Confide in me

Its one big messy Cartesian join, this world. I mean, just look at your ever-growing list of contacts in your mobile phone for once. There isn’t enough to set it apart from a list of the ill-famed I-need-to-double-my-money-in-a
-fortnight applicants who applied for the crazy DDA lottery. And then you talk, each one of you to each one of you. Find yourselves those corners of the room which you never knew existed, ram yourself against the wall, covering up your mouth, look at some distant nothing and talk.

You have become one big ear and one big mouth. Jubilant cackles, maudlin whispers, feverish confessions, sloppy tales, anguished boohoos, cacophonic bawls and the works. It all gets thrown around to be chewed, swallowed, digested and excreted. Like a daily shot of cocaine you just can not do without, you just HAVE to talk and you just HAVE to hear someone talk.

There is something strangely alluring and addictive about that someone somewhere, wrapped in a cloak of mystery. You become just a compulsive voyeur waiting for that baronial cape to open up and drop down, for you to have a peek inside. But its actually when you take a moment to think that you realize, it’s the magnet inside you want to wind an extra loop of wire around to pull more, pull the heavier, pull the immovable which makes that someone somewhere intriguing. The urge for them to helplessly shed that cloak, and stand bare in front of YOU, is really what is intriguing.

Its never about them, it’s about you. The lure of playing the agony aunt or a confidante which people will exclusively shed their dirty linen to is quite overwhelming. That dreaded sound of silence is killing. You need them for you to exist. Pain is a sweet pill. The more painful it is the sweeter. Others’ pain always tastes that way. It infact aches if they prefer a shoulder other than yours. You could well be a billboard screaming 'Confide in me!' But after a while they are whining and not talking, about the same old things, about their same old worthless lives. And you need someone with a fresh new cloak, and then some more. Keep them coming….

The more you listen to them, the more you forget about yours. And your linen suddenly looks all the more aglow without you giving it a tiring scrub. You just let it be, because that’s the way it is and there is worse out there. And someone close to you keeps looking at you, legs crossed, waiting patiently for you to turn away from the corner, waiting for your restless steps to halt and turn back, waiting for you to come and sit near to him after you had cut him off at that phone ring.

They never had a gold-threaded cloak to wear but have a lot to say. They share the linen with you which you let lay after you woke up in a jiffy at the ringing of the phone. They lie there denuded underneath that thin linen and wait for the day when you would look into their eyes, caress their hair and say “Confide In Me”….