A PEBBLE’S GEM HUNT

(Prelude: “Sometimes I sit with the gem in my hand doing nothing but stare at their beauty, I feel that I glimpse eternity as I float around in their blinding dazzle”)

I bend over; I search through the rotten and stinking refuse, through silt and sand with seconds ticking away into hours, days and years. My hands harden with labour and I feel as if I it has been ages since I’ve stood straight. But when I will finally find it, that gleaming and glittering stone flaunting their colour through its facets, shining as if to redefine the definition of ‘dazzling’, then I will feel as though I’ve been paid for the years of nothingness. I know it because I’ve found them in the past. And when I hold them tight in my hand as if to feel what they are inside( something that I cannot be, a beauty too profound for me to fathom), I feel that I’m one of them but then as I start loving them and share all that I have with their brilliance, I feel liquid on my palms. That is when I open my tightly clutched arms to see that the gem is gone and my hands have started bleeding at the place I held ‘my precious’.

Each time I bleed, my brain tells me to bail out of this race (because I don’t see a goal ahead, it is just a dream that drives me) but my heart tells me to go on. Each time a gem makes me bleed(and disappears) the sad realization dawns on me that she is not for me and I have to keep on searching. So I go on and on and on…

I dream about them all the time, there isn’t a moment that passes by without me dreaming about a gem that would change my life; a gem that would transform me, one that would love me even as I’m a pebble (sometime my looks made me a pebble, sometimes my family, sometimes the place I’m from, sometimes the God I worship, sometimes something else). But the more I seem to find and love the gems, the more I lose hope of that day when ‘my precious’ would come to take me to the wonderland to transform me. Will she come?

But something keeps telling me not to lose hope. So, I work through the dirt forgetting the fact that I’m just a pebble who would not settle for another pebble because in a pebble’s dream it is a gem that it becomes. I come across phony gems among all the other pebbles and dirt that slips through my hand as I work my way through the never ending mound of earth (which was not gracious enough to make me a gem when I was born) and they waste my time making me think that they are real but as time passes and trials descent, I learn that they are nothing but phony gems. When I get a real gem I immediately know that it is real because I feel my heart throb and blood gush merrily through my veins.

I don’t know if I have a destination, a goal or a prize. All I know is that If I don’t get a gem, I will die without a gem and wont regret of not having dreamed of it.

INTERLUDE:

‘All that I am is just another pebble, yet of a gem I dream

I search foolishly through rain, shine and hail

The scars of my pebble body are the gifts o gems that I found in the past

Yet for their bruises, I’ll toil

For though they make me bleed, their bruises are so sweet

So will I work, spend all I have to find a gem, the one that I dream of’

ODE to the pebble:

“SO HE TOILED AND TOILED, ONE DAY HE DISAPPEARED WHEN FINALLY ALL THE SUBSTANCE THAT HIS PEBBLE BODY WAS MADE OF WORE AWAY BY THE WOUNDS AND DEEP SCARS GIFTED BY GEMS. NOW HE LIES IN THE SAND WITH ALL OTHER GRAINS NOT EVEN RECOGNISED AS THE PEBBLE WHICH NEVER GAVE UP. HE LIES THERE AS THE DIRT FOR THE NEXT DREAMY PEBBLE’S GEM SEARCH AFTER WHICH IT’D ALSO JOIN THE DIRT FOR THE NEXT DREAMY PEBBLE AND THE NEXT..”