When You Don't Blink At A Cloud's Sudden Passing

When You Won’t Blink At A Cloud’s Sudden Passing

It would be quite obvious to say that he was neither a perfect person, nor a minimally flawed individual with fascinating prowesses, or one who could strike an honourable bargain with a respectable order of people. Whatever it be, he turns out to be my old man and I his son, and it goes without saying that I can’t brush him aside for gold. Even if he is quite adamant in provoking my antagonism against his dictums.

That’s why when he called me after a really long time, I hesitantly drew myself in full statement down here. Only because I wanted to check in on him. I knew the old brunt wouldn’t go off easy, but would’ve become tougher and wiser with time. The same hidden intention’s fire struck me in our forced encounter’s second dialogue, but thrust from his side-

“Why would I disown my ego for the best results that were never sustained? the good words that no one ever spoke to me?? the unnoticeable but endless hostility I’ve been subject to??? or the greatness I couldn’t scale in a single conquest?! Why the bloody...(grunts)”

Either the old man was behaving worse than his age could suggest or I were just too young to notice that there was nothing wrong in what was being indirectly discoursed. Now I remember something he used to constantly touch upon when critically sane and about until a decade ago.

“There’s no such thing as age. It’s only a number ‘the fragmentally immature’ use to proclaim their barren supremacy. Physicality is just a material measure and only a few know that as it starts receding, you start earning the actual one. The superimposition of nothing, in small bits and pieces. It’s what fills you to the end of real worth. But there is, what you call an unfailing egotist”

When he said ‘the end of real worth’, he used to mean it with a sure swing of his hands and affected substance. How couldn’t one not fathom that ‘the end doesn’t bring down the curtains but raise it and fill the body of nothing with worth’, and especially when its this nutty old man’s son who behaves half as goofed up as him.

“Why did you want me here now?”, I expelled a blank sigh for the purpose of doing it.

He didn’t ask me to “look after yourself when I’m gone” which he knows I won’t do the either way, but commanded me to produce a drink’s shuffle in immediacy. As soon as I filled in this secondary detail, he told me-

“There was a time when you dare pointed out a mistake in me and I thrashed you out of my house in the daylight, if you will remember...”

I kept my calm ,only out of respect for his ‘pale white, but regal’ condition, although my wavering temper had come out of the ice box and was pinning rage’s suppressed outflow on me.

“I want you to know that I realise my mistake today. Whatever you did then what was out of the question however. You were too arrogant and nosy for a boy of your age, so desperate at outdefining yourself. Although I were wrong, you shouldn’t have dare pointed it out to me. Teach that to your students. They’ll respect you for that after a really long time”

I said with contained calm-“I never learned any lessons. But now I think I should since you’re pointing them out to me. Nor do I intend to teach anyone else like you”

“What does that nonsense mean?”

“I never thought you would admit a mistake from your side. I still don’t think you will ever do. But when you say you’re sorry...”

“Who the f* told you I’m sorry!”

“That’s what it’s meant to be, right!”

“The hell it does boy. You’re a slow learner”

As it started drizzling, “the slow learner” in me decided to raise an umbrella which hung in my hand from the beginning. I kept the leather belt I had brought with me by his sepulchre and walked away.

He came with me as I had carried him all the way, enamoured by the glitz of an attempted but failed retribution.

Backstory: *Once, a caring father had hit his son with a leather belt and taught him what was pain. He did this because his son had started to question his authority without stating proper reasons or sharing his greatness. The son, later saved this belt to tighten his waistpants and hit others for the same offence he did to his father. No one ever questioned him anymore, and now was the time to return the tool of his undivided betterment to its real owner*

But, he seems not to cease. “The end of worth...” as it goes. When he’s there with me, I don’t need this belt anymore.