Moments define my life. If you are an important part of my life, chances are, you made good on your moments. Those times when time is suspended between seconds--the tiny, negligible vacuum between the ticking seconds--when the second-hand moves from 0059 to 0000. Those are defining moments. They come mysteriously and randomly. Moments of make or break, as we like to say. A simple meal--during a painful silence you make a decision to stay or to go; after the meal, you prod at the thick cloud of possibilities and pick one and that is the pivotal moment. Had you picked some other option, another set of events and emotions might have unfurled or been left buried. These moments bring people eons closer, or miles and miles apart.

Sometimes when you call people and they don't pick up and they call you back, it's just not the same anymore. The moment was gone. Whatever you wanted to achieve might still be achieved in the end, but the emotional tags have been snipped. On the Apollonian level, this is an entirely unfair conclusion--the other party might have been busy, or asleep, or bound by other circumstances. But rational reasoning often doesn't make anything better. At best, sometimes, they're just excuses we crap up for them--and what kind of comfort is there in that?

Nobody picked up my calls just now. Maybe it's a divine sign that this real and long-delayed misery is something that I must hold alone. Maybe Divinity is telling me that this final/crushing/belated misery is solely exclusive to me and me alone. That I cannot share it with anyone anymore at this point, this moment. That this is freezing water in the morning for ME and my feverish battle.

So this is my own little Gladiator,
and I'm on my own out there
in the middle of the square.
But, will you walk with me from
the spectator stands,
and perhaps,
cry a little when I falter?
And when the battle's over,
when I'm slumped with spent tears in the sand--
will you come down and stroke my hair,
wipe the coarse grains away
and let me cry some more?
Or will you watch with eyes glazed with sympathy,
and then,
simply
walk away?