Labarinth

By Priyadarshini Maji

I felt like I was behind bars - no surrounded by bars from all sides, slowly coming close, choking me. I couldn’t see anything clearly; it was all dark and damp. I tried to run but I had nowhere to go, I was blocked from all sides. I panicked and kept shouting but I couldn’t even hear my own voice. Fear. Fear of the unknown crumbled me, engulfed me in its pit.. My tears stopped, before they touched my cheeks. Suddenly everything froze, there was no bar around me, I stopped, and looked around the labyrinth I was lost in. It was a trick. A trick to confuse. To amaze.

We spend our whole life in the labyrinth, but thinking how we will escape it one day and how prodigious it will be, and imagining that unfolding keeps us going. But it will never happen. It’s a bewitched thought. We just use the future to escape the present.

A labyrinth is a symbolic journey, a path laid in front of us, which we just have to follow. There is no end to this road..the end where there is no more mystery, no more hope, no more questions to ask and where everything is answered. But there is no such place. We are in a labyrinth made of labyrinths. Each leads to another. I am crouching blindly through a labyrinth of threat. The Only certainty is, another bend ahead, not even my death.

I don’t ever want this truth of reality to slip my mind but I want to understand it from the outside, not experience the inside from the inside.

To escape this, the solution is not to find the exit but not entering the damn thing in the first place. But we are not creatures of freewill. Sometimes, pretending is the best way to get out of the labyrinth of life.

So life is not the straight and fast highway, it is a way out but through the silky damp dark labyrinth.

By Priyadarshini Maji