A broken tooth

Where do all the unfinished stories go? Do they pile up in a secret hole in the space, undisclosed to all its habitants. Could they evaporate into the atmosphere along with dust and sit somewhere in the infinite ozone. What if they are not as remote and unreachable as one would perceive them to be. What If they are used to exact revenge on people by being made to surface at inappropriate time, through inappropriate ways. Everybody loves a good scandal. In the age of digital township, the instances of information misuse have been reported to be alarmingly high. It would be incredibly foolish to go blind to their growing presence in our human world. Look around, unfinished stories, are born every day, mostly out of sheer negligence like babies born out of incompetent condoms. At the writer’s desk, jostling with literary bigwigs for space and recognition; in a director’s mind, playing themselves out in a loop until they lose steam and are shown the exit doors; In the lover’s eye, germing in the hollow silences of their distant conversation till the voice in their head intervenes and declares temporary truce.

Words once uttered cannot be discarded. They have lived their life, accomplished their purpose by fulfilling all mandates of successful communication and deserve to wear off from the cognition. But what about the unease inflicted upon oneself when one loses one’s thoughts tragically to another realm of time and space. These thoughts whirl around to form clusters of unfinished stories like packs of migrants forced to flee from their respective colonies inside our brains. They may not reach anywhere but what are the odds they wouldn’t reappear like pirates from a long lost ship. If proper stories, of proper length and proper breadth have the power to rankle with our brains, imagine what wreckage they are capable to cause us through the power of their deformity. Unfinished stories, uninterrupted by colons and periods, can become an unmanned river on a distant island preparing itself to flood havoc on civilisation.

What birthed them in the first place? Lack of concentration, self-censorship, procrastination. Some of the most illuminating words fall prey to the said factors. Several stories offer themselves as martyrs in pursuit of a better one. Others just lose sight of the writers because they were unimportant from the start, or so they it was believed. It’s a pity that their fate rests on a powerful and heart wrenching ending, in the absence of which they become victims of collective indifference. It is irrelevant who they feature as subjects or how intensely were they conceived. Their identity loses out of to their deficiency. Like a popular tape stuck inside the player, forced to leave the gathering full of enchanted listeners. On other occasions, they are forced to leap into nothingness because the situation demands so. Like death. Stories disappear mysteriously like its owners but are to re-emerge as memories with their obfuscated intentions. The lingering ache that our brain fails to recognise as memory is perhaps the distressing come back of unfinished stories- written in another realm of consciousness. Should the writer fear them as vestiges from his past or should he hunt them till they provide him a closure. The choice happens to be a privilege not enjoyed by everybody.

Mirabus woke up with a menacing headache. Her eyes were droopy from a disturbed sleep. Her mind was drained, writing an article about unfinished stories in her study last night. She watched the sun rays beaming on the lilac walls of her room with her half opened eyes. What a terrible terrible start. She reached out to the pockets of her nightgown as she desperately tried to recollect the dream in which she lost her back tooth.