Latitudes of Longing

by Shubhangi Swarup

“Do you know why you sought me out in my final moments?” “No.” “We are the same. You are one of us.” “And him?” “He isn’t. But you have loved him in many lives. Some spirits bridge the gap between different worlds through love. It keeps us all together.”

For most of those who perished, the final image they carried was of a summer sky, an indifferent eyewitness. As indifferent to the movement of continents as it was to the sight of a fisherman’s corpse floating in the water, surrounded by butterflies.

What is the purpose of belief if even god can’t put the world back the way you worshipped it?

Nostalgia, it seemed, was a being with short-term memory. It yearned for things that were quickly receding but rarely for the distant past. To live in the distant past—the German neurologist Alzheimer would prove—was a sign of premature senility.

Baked by the harsh sun, her thumbprint will remain there undisturbed and hidden. Until a crane lands on the same spot nine years later, and the place begins to attract tribes of migratory birds in search of a safe spot to rest, refuel, and share tales of what they’ve seen on their travels.

If the evolution of life was guided by survival, the movement of continents was guided by an imagination that no life form would be capable of comprehending.

In the approaching horizon of the future, the calamity is a certain uncertainty, the greatest one there ever will be. It links them all.

In heaven, we are all inconsequential. Could there exist a bigger blessing?

On occasions, it lulled him into surrendering to the ghosts of longing, staring at the image for hours, imagining how different his life could have been, had it not been this way.

“In death, we find the hope we had surrendered at birth.”

Compared to all the glorious lives one can lead, the human one is quite a chore.

The sun and the moon are the most ancient of lovers. Though there are more than a thousand moons and satellites in the solar system, the sun, if truth be told, is drawn to only her. The center of the universe longs to withdraw from it all by crawling into her crater, like an ocean resting in the womb of a shell.

Each fortnight, the lovers’ quarrels reduce the moon to a quarter of her size. Each fortnight, love gives her renewed strength.

space. Devoid of tectonics, evolutions, and all other inexorable transitions, emptiness is all that exists. An emptiness outside the reach of this expanding universe and the relentless grip of time. And within it, the possibility of you and I.