In the Depths of Chaos: A Journey to Sublime Awakening – (1st Winner of Our Short Story Contest’23)

In my little dark room among my little dark thoughts and my little bright dreams, a room where I had slaughtered a thousand identities, a room where trauma seeped into the deepest vein. A room where I was far away from what you would call normal; my cognition and my perception failed me at every instance, tearing me apart in the void of understating and stealing everything that was ever bright. It was nothing but another day, neither less nor more, just Me, my rotten bed, and my rotten daydreams: I embarked on a routine journey not very interesting but a walk in the rage of the sun amidst the shade of dark, my body an ever-dry desert that was thirsty for an event to happen, with an internal state of peaceful anguish I went on walking. My eyes were plump with curiosity that held dripping pearls of unripe questions, eyes that cloaked chaos: the chaos that took me ages to nurture. While walking in the shade, I stumbled upon a pond of lilies, the water didn’t resemble water but could be called slime with every kind of filth one can think of, but the colors and purity of the flowers hit me at once a feeling of shiver, and if one must try to understand how it felt one would have to imagine a snake shedding its skin, That is how I felt this is how it was: ineffable, the element that was mind-boggling was not the purity of the lilies living amid filth but the state of my ignorance and my dreams soaring sunwards with its roots weak yet dreamy like a dew drop. I understood for once that one must be strong as the lily flower that blooms among filth and still captivates a thousand lovers. And it also became evident very evident why the creator looks down on his creation. Yes! He experiences the chaos; he sees the ugly, the unacceptable first, and then experiences the beauty of his creation, leaving him in a state of limbo for he does not understand binary, the magic of binaries, for he is too focused on perfection rather than striving towards a complete harmonious whole. This new, so not new, thought shook me to my core, for the event that I was yearning for had its founding in a flower amidst dirt. This encounter sparked a new encounter, and the fetal pursuit of knowledge, drawing upon me more and more, led me to doors of paradoxes: fiction, poetry, architecture, and philosophy dominated my thoughts. I started to think in verses I started to live in books. The more I learned, the less it became and the worse my pursuit got. Back to my little confinement, tired of thinking and feeling, I chose to take resort to sleep, which reminded me of dreams; it was not that I was fascinated by dreams, but I never saw the sleep dream, so I craved it; I craved how it would feel, they used to laugh at me for I was too concerned about the little things, the trivial matter. It was particularly this day in my life that I was partly living that I experienced a dream within a dream: I was on a boat with a creature that I could comprehend neither his appearance nor his existence. His forlorn face sagged, devoid of faith; he was the perfect kind that humans would term a monster which appeared quite strange to my thinking; I was just trying my best to philosophize this situation but failed miserably. So, I stopped and slowed down, and it was at this slow pace that I saw in him at once an inescapable existence: I saw hope and despair, knowledge and ignorance, madness and sanity, loyalty, and betrayal, but above all and above all I saw calmness fighting them all. It was precisely at this moment that we exited the bay, and What I saw made me question how can a simple object be this grand and majestic? As far as my vision penetrated, I saw the visible confusion-shaped mountains. Their peaks protruded like needles from the blanket of mist. They were neither more nor less than a perfect picture of the sublime. This whole made me sick to my core, for I thought I knew the intricacies of nature, for I thought I understood life, but all I could do was act as a tormented and fragmented soul. I tried to strike up a conversation with the monster whom I named bony hands, for his hands seemed to have survived an eternity. He found my amusement and reactions funny, for he claimed, “You have cut the wrong cords” which I couldn’t understand. What cords and what cuts, where are they connected, and how should I join them? He answers as if he knows what I feel and what I think. He recites a few lines from a romantic poet “Our meddling intellect, Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things: – We murder to dissect.” And write after he spits these lines, he says, “Connect it back to the throne room.” This I understood quite late, for what he referred to as the throne room was the heart. It was so evident that I was ashamed that my whole self was packed in a bubble of filthy needs and wants. He gave me a detailed description of the throne room that my memory consumed, just like the mountains were consumed by the mist of hopeful despair. All I could remember was a peacock tapestry, and that was all I needed to understand what he intended to convey. Awake from my slumber, I rushed outside shouting in the sun amidst shade that I would be Icarus without the Icarus complex, living is present, beauty is present, and future and past are present. That day I saw divinity in the shaft of sunlight; that day, I felt the wisdom of nature and its sublimity.

.

About the author: Mujtaba Hilal is a student of English literature and linguistics at IMSciences, Peshawar. He indulges in poetry and prose writing quite prolifically. His diction in prose is just as beautiful as the one in his poetic ventures.