Distance

Streams, streams endless of harmony, of words but not of words in harmony. The day has been suspended, aid to forego by an altered state of consciousness initiated by lucid dreaming. The dream started with a friendly longing as two young boys, long-lost and far-forgotten friends united after ages of isolation from the company of one another. Met with each other in an empty, dark and unfamiliar room, the only trustworthy aid was the relation of the two features and apart from that nothing was familiar or known.

The sun hung humbly and scantily threw its light into the room through the window above the table beside the bed. Over the bed was a mirror which helped the grooming of one of the friends who was the possible owner of the room. The other friend entered only later, turned the knob and pushed the door into the room from one side and thrust forward his body from the other end. His senses were stripped off from him at the sight of his friend and the walking dead approached the bed and fell aside his comrade. Years of seclusion was removed from between them and all that remained was the invisible sheet and the cold feel of that thin dark air in which we breathe as we go about our lives in this cruel mortal world. The two talked of their times together, of their quixotic adventures and they talked of good times and the times that seemed bad at the moment but now were worth a remembrance. The thin dark air now turned into a fog of past listlessly hovering about the two figures. In a sudden moment of rapture, two solid human figures arise from this listless fog settled between them. The figure bears striking resemblance to the aunts of the friend with whom the other friend is acquiesced. The figures of the aunts intermit their conversation and engage each of them separately in their fake and frugal trivialities which both of the friends loathe equally but are bound to heel out of respect. They talk in a context so irrelevant to their union that the second friend stops the procession of any and all sounds to his ears and hence the worthless mouthing of the aunts appear to him gibberish. He dulls his perception to accelerate the passing moments of time and hence pays close attention to objects that cut him off from the relative sense of time while the other friend indulges himself to the discourse at hand portraying great and generous amounts of congeniality and gregariousness.

The other friend looks at the whitewashed walls and the perpendicular angles the walls make with the ceiling. The subtle off-white creaminess of the walls also attract much of his attention and send him into a state of reverie wherein he existed in two three-dimensional planes simultaneously at the same instant of time. The scenery of both the spaces was similar and so it was hard to determine which the real was and which the void as both of them had the second friend surrounded by four walls.

The difference was that while in the first case, the creamy walls had supposed dimensions and were away from the body oh his person by a measurable distance but in the second case, the walls appeared to deface and gradually melt all over him. It did not create a sense of fear or paranoia in him as it occurred only in one space which, by extension of human logic that deems melting walls as fantasy, thought of the second space as the void. That however, did not cease or exit his existence in that void and he still persisted among the melting walls with the cement turning into raw slurry mixed with the whitewash. The other space to him was reality where the existence of his friend and his aunts served as a motif to his own being,

He was brought back into conversation he had so selfishly termed nonsense by his definitions when the word 'trip' was mentioned somewhere in between. At the very registration of that word into his psyche, he found himself in the car driving off into the road that unfolded itself in front of him like an infinite roll of black carpet. A cognitive shift or a lapse in memory resulted in complete loss of procedure he would have underwent such as exiting the house, walking towards the car, making way into the car and the second friend did not even care to pay attention to the driver of the car as he gazed outside at the loop of scenery and wildlife vegetation that passed with the passing of milestones as if in a circle looping around with little tweaks in between. They finally reach their destination which was a cemetery that sprawled off into the farthest depths of horizon and tombstones grew over the extensive stretch of wasteland over which an artificial greenery of plastic green grass could be observed and felt as one treaded over it with tender feet. The imagery of death was heavenly and scores of people congregated over the tombstones of their respective deceased to pay their respects but the construct of the land and the area between the subsequent tombstones was such that the population appeared to be sparse although it could logically be deduced that it actually was not.

It was only after getting out of the car that the two friends shared the comfort of each others' company again. They walked together along this valley of death over which even the sun shone with shame, respect and grief and only an autumnal sepia tinge marked the brightness of the place.

The attention of the second friend was beseeched by a lady dressed in traditional Indian sari accompanied by two men on either side. She was the embodiment of the pathos and sadness that was abound that place among the plains. The second friend investigated her but his initial stare fell not on her body or her dress, or her hair and fell till her pert rump which stood by the grave or the two men who accompanied her. His initial point of investigation became her dark sodden eyes, ridden, burdened with grief and he sensed distortion and madness in them as the pupils of her eyes hugged the drooped down eyelids. Her body was discombobulated and it took the shoulder of those two men to carry her across although for some reason she insisted on keeping to her feet rendered possible only by the aid of the two men. The first friend also had a grave to visit, that of his far-distant relative yet someone he had used to. It was not a moment of grief for the first friend as much as the lady. As for the boy, it was a moment of silent admittance that marked the passing of soul of the one buried in the grave from the deep corners of the boy's heart.

For the second friend, it was a moment of idleness and seeing his friend busy with his own thoughts, he grazed off away from his friend and from the vicinity of the two aunts. He would not have gotten far, or so he thought when he saw a strange sight that boggled his mind and senses. It seemed that from the naked threadbare branches of trees which extended over the broad strokes of the blue sky like the arms of a cripple beggaring for alms, all the cotton had fallen down from the many trees lined one after the other along the course of the endless plains onto the land of the dead which grew milky white and fluffy and looked exactly and without a single bit of difference as though the clouds from the highest brinks of sky and from heavens if there was such a place descended upon Earth and accumulated in that place.

The young boy could not resist his temptation to walk off into the clouds never once feeling anxious or weary of where he would take him. The boy, even not from once. Turned back to look at his friend whom he had so warmly greeted and whose company he so desired in the real world or the aunts who served as guardians to his adolescent fancy and motifs to his existence and the affirmation of his self. With slow steps, though not hesitant steps the boy walked to the point where he stood among the plastic green grass and the cottony clouds that extended beyond his visions and met the blue horizon of the sky was just an inch away. All that mattered now was the leap of faith, It was not a moment of test or judgment though as the boy felt neither in making his certain decision. He leaped forward and walked among the clouds into the horizon letting the broad bright light coming from afar length devour his whole body for none to see. 

Reviews

[Jacob Clifford]

Before I talk about the story itself, I highly suggest changing the font or the font size. It's hard on the eyes and is not inviting. I wish such things didn't matter, but many people won't read more than a paragraph of a story if it looks like this.

This feels like an early draft, so I'll just give some general advice and let you play around with what you have here. One of the first things I noticed was that your sentences are very wordy. Sometimes they do need to be wordy, but often they can be trimmed down. For example: "The sun hung humbly and scantily threw its light into the room through the window above the table beside the bed." This sentence is fairly long. Try breaking it up into two sentences, or add a comma & conjunction. Otherwise, the sentence feels very bogged down and is hard to process.

Additionally, try to avoid passive voice when possible. Make sure that you use active voice (i.e. He opened the door, instead of The door was opened by him. I know that isn't' the best example, so you may want to look up active and passive voice if you aren't familiar with the concepts).

This is a bit of an unorthodox story, which I am all for; I love these different types of stories. I find myself saying this to many people lately, but this story could really shine if you took a little time and revised it.