There is magic for those who believe in it

The cold breeze is poking my face. My eyes leak. The heart is pounding at a pace it is not accustomed to doing so. I know this feeling. I have felt this before. I had longed for this feeling before, yet, here I am and it feels so uneasy and uncomfortable. It feels like I am reacquainting myself with the taste of my favourite delicacy.

The buzz of the people around seems like an inviting change than the recent norm. My feet though refusing to budge. Here I am expecting the breeze to nudge me in a suitable direction. Instead, there is strange paralysis.

My mind wanders, wary of the big things to come and at the same time fixating on the little things in the past. It is its own prisoner and yet the focus is always on the small ray of sunshine coming in through the window sills and cracks of the prison cell. I, like my mind, am always stuck in that space between the darkness and the first ray of sunshine. It needs a sudden jolt to wake up from its own slumber.

A gentle nudge from some passerby followed by a fleeting apology is all it took for me to come back to reality. People were still buzzing while I drifted too far off lands with my mind and returned to be a part of the buzz. Nothing ever changes if you consider a million lives and their affinity to a set routine yet when you look back something if not everything always seems different. I held this feeling when I started walking again through the sea of people, to nowhere yet trying to find that familiar feeling. I thought to myself, here we go, stuck between that familiar space of anticipation of something new and longing that is long gone.

My eyes browse, looking for something new yet recognizable to me. They notice the unnoticed, register the obvious and are always on the lookout for something bizarre and unknown. I, like my eyes, am an explorer, a voyeur, if you may, of the modern era trying to capture the simplest of pleasures. As always, they never disappoint.

I took a step forward to complement the discovery of my eyes. Not to give my eyes too much credit, it is rather difficult to miss a sparkling entrance designed to invite wandering eyes. The large initials on the top of a small two-door entrance refused to identify the place. The embroidered door frame gave it a Vedic personality. I was surfing through the waves of people towards the door, only to emerge on the other side like a surfer emerging through the blue barrel. The wooden door shut after me. The darkroom had rays of neon light flickering from point to point, serving no purpose but to add to the suspense of the scenery. I took a step forward and was greeted with a helping hand. I shrugged it as I was taken aback by the strangeness of the whole situation. The darkness still prominent, I pondered on the dangerous choice of trusting the unknown helping hand.

A rational man like myself, lived a life filled with permutations and combinations deduced to the very minute atomic detail. If it wasn’t for the sudden realization of mortality, I wouldn’t have sworn off my rationality. The months spent cooped up in an apartment rewired certain elements of my personality which brought me to this dark empty passage of a room hand in hand with a stranger.

The flickering lights met my eyes giving me a glimpse of colours in the room. The chill air near the entrance of the room turned warm and then chill again as the hand guided me through the long never-ending passage. The hand which seemed strange and distrustful in the beginning was starting to feel warm and soft. As light emerged from the adjacent smoke-filled room, a figure attached to the hand began to emerge. Long wavy hair curtained most parts yet revealed enough to notice the curvy edges moving sideways in a hypnotic rhythm. As I traversed my eyes from bottom to the top, the hand suddenly left its grip on my hand and began to part ways. The smoke-filled room began to clear and a sudden sense of familiarity returned.

You either believe in magic or you don’t. There is no in-between. There is scepticism off course. But sceptics are those who haven’t yet explored their extent of imagination enough. If I am to open my imagination a tiny bit, I could accept the fact that I was standing right in the middle of a magic store, selling items of certain imaginary value that can achieve the unbelievable.

I took a step forward to one of the glass booths and quizzed the attendant on a certain colourful gemstone. She smiled, adjusted her glasses and picked the gemstone out of the glass shelf with a set of tongs and placed it in front of me. She did all of it so carefully so as to not disturb the stone and not to accidentally touch it. She quoted a reasonable price yet warned that if I touch it, the stone has the power to change the perspective of your world. I smiled. I locked my eyes with hers. I smiled again. My rationality fought with my imagination. My newfound free and spontaneous self ignored it and in the fleeting moment bought the stone.

The power of the mind, when set free, is limitless. If set free after a period of imprisonment, can have the potential to go berserk. The trick though lies in keeping hold of the sanity while the mind wanders on its own.

I stepped out of the magic store into the real world with the gemstone in my hand. Nothing changed. The air still freezing cold. People still seemed lost in their own world. I started walking without any hesitation as if my feet knew the way. The cold freezing breeze had lost its bite. For the first time in a long time, I saw a smile directed at me. Then there was another and another. Suddenly the feet moved with a step, eyes sparkled and the smiles were returned with a smile. The world seemed to have returned to normal. I stopped and checked for the gemstone in my hand. It was still there, still holding its sparkle. I gently put it inside my pocket and decided to keep walking, still keeping the smile.

The rationale of the turn of the events seemed to matter less if at all there was any. The scepticism still lingered but did not seem to hold prominence. 

Here I was lost again in that space between the anticipation and longing. Though this time, my feet moved and I held onto my smile.