Insomnia at will

It all started out of necessity.

While I was still at the Academy, my close friends were either students or had finished with their studies and had taken up jobs instead and they were not available to me during the day hours when I would be home on holidays. We would meet up late evening everyday and stay up till wee hours.

We would walk along the depopulated roads at those late hours; I think the cabs were probably the only vehicles that were seen on the roads then because their yellow-red taillights seem to have entrenched in my sub-conscious memory since. Or, we would sit in an Irani restaurant near the railway station, that would remain open for the late night rail commuters, and share our increasing and dwindling stocks of thoughts and cigarettes respectively.

A few years later, I would sit with my fiancée in her house, look out and remark, “It is so beautiful outside, I think sleeping at this hour would be simply wasting it”. We would talk most of the time but there would be intermittent spells of silence, sometimes for breathing in the magnificent quiet that pervaded beyond and sometimes for no reason at all since we do not always need words for communicating.

Communication may be a necessary initial investment for creating a feeling of togetherness but not for long. Later, communication joins this feeling of togetherness in a feedback loop; whenever one weakens, the other fortifies it…..