back when

“Let’s just say I was testing the bounds of reality.”- Jim Morrison (1943-71).

The mug-shot in chiaroscuro with its hair on fire, a thin neck with an oversized Adam’s apple and the famous fish-pout stared back at me from a poster on the wall. The Guns N’ Roses poster alongside echoed with- “You may not like our integrity, we built a world out of anarchy…”. The black boom box on the aluminum trunk seemed to be the epicentre of this rebellion as it blared ‘Sad but True’ from Metallica’s black album. The study table with its red table lamp and a few piles of books sat forlorn in one corner of the small room along with an ascetic’s chair with a plastic mesh to sit on. I knew exactly where the Debonair and sundry sleazy literature were hidden under all my course books. Over the bed sat a boy with bushy hair, his naked torso gleaming with beads of sweat. His eyes were clenched shut in intense concentration as he drummed the air to the song’s rhythm. I remembered the boy that was me back in 1991, but barely. I remembered how he longed to die young. I could faintly recall his fantasies of causing arson and chaos and the saintly image he found himself trapped in. I remembered his curious disability to fit in and how he could not envision a future, any future.

I turned back and let my gaze fall upon the present. I saw my wife, heck, my boy, my job, and a much saner version of myself in the middle of all this. It seemed impossible, and yet, there it was.