In The darkest Of His Days

He was young, a poet in heart, body and soul.
Some would call him unskilled, because he wrote what came to his mind, not
worrying about rhyme or metre. At times he didn't have the faintest clue
what he was writing about, but when he wrote with all he had, it started to
seem beautiful.

He wasn't famous, only his best friends got to read his poems. His world
seemed to revolve around him. But what most people did not know, was that
his world was empty, as he, at what would be the centre of his world, was
a gaping hole. His mother and father separated when he was young, and most
of his poems revolved around the sense of loss the separation left him with.

His personal life was hell. The girl he loved rejected him, his mother didn't
let him call his father, and drowned him in rules that would seem backward
in the past century. He resorted to tobacco to escape from it. Coming from
a conservative background, this was akin to snorting cocaine for him. But it
eased the pain he constantly carried around in his chest, and for him, that
alone was enough.

He would wonder at times, if there was a way out of his madness. Those
times he would go alone to the fort, that was the primary tourist attraction
in his town, and write. He would write about things normal teenagers his age
would never dare to write about. But as we now know, he was far from being
a normal teenager.

At times, he would just sit there, at a corner so old an dilapidated, no one
ever noticed it, except him. He would sit there thinking about how life would
have been, had it gone the other way. Not many people his age would go to
the length of questioning the very basis of things, but he did.
Why was the sky always light blue, when those under it, especially him,
imagined a dark dome over their heads, from which there was no escape?
Why do random strangers find ways to connect, in ways unforeseeable?
And why was he watching all this, lost in the midst of the turmoil of
everyday life? Questions he knew, best left unanswered.

He wrote his first poem sitting in that corner of the fort, so old, even
history had forgotten it, just like life had forgotten him, moving on at a
speed, he could not catch up to.

"Here i sit
In this damp corner
Somehow broken, yet whole
Wishing for some way,
to walk away
And piece together the puzzle,
of my life, I cannot
I borrow, but i do not steal
My heart pounding, i can but feel,
a person standing next to me
Someone i cannot lie to
someone who can hold me together,
in this darkest of my days"

Whenever he was in need of hope, he would read this piece, which was neither
poetry nor prose, but a part of him. Oddly though, he would feel comforted,
and he would again tread on the road through the darkest of his days,
knowing there is hope somewhere along the way.