HUE ON RUST

it was that weary yellowed photograph which i kept in my secret collection took me back to the vintage part of my life.i can hear my son fighting with his mother when she found cigarette packet in his room....i couldn't say anything...i came to my room to find solitude from that clash of the titans......now i am at my convenient  confinement inside that big house......to relapse into my college days ....i found that old lively pic of our gang....
that time resistant photograph is the replica of our times......that single frame have absorbed every vital ingredients of our age....a Walkman,panama cigarettes,big carrera shades, a pack of grass,beer bottles surrounded by five of us looking like tribes in laughter lost in a fantastic world of our own.....
it was the time of our lives ....where every second was a celebrated moment,every ride had new destiny,and every day had a suspense ....when we five guys found the pride in riding rx 100 roaring past the girls waiting for bus,long hair and beard admiring the hippie culture,and the motto was "drugs leaf and pink floyd"...
the nights when guys trip in those vast blue skies melting  inside their thoughts forgetting the pain and residing over the illuminated night .....
the time when love was so sublime,subtle and less expressive that a glance means a burst opened champagne bottle....and every love lost creates a life sinking in darkness....soothing  in grass and the musical chords of floyd,marley and jim morrison... mostly resulting in disastrous ends of depression....
Joe,the romanticist  in our group,soft spoken like his words felt like the melting of dew drops.....colored our lives with his music and poems in those nights thawed with smoke and beer .....
one night changed our life ..like plunge back from our trippy world of colors to the black and white of reality....the long silence we have been noticing of joe had an abrupt end......sub conscious was the norm then.....Joe was in his own world.....always singing those famous lines "i have become comfortably numb" and playing those psychedelic chords in his guitar.....he was alone in his island... we used to say he is doping to enjoy his real addiction to depression....but none of us realy understood that he was enjoying a hallucinating darkness .....
the usual night in terrace ....transcending away to find new worlds.....no one really noticed  Joe ....humming a song looking at the sky....."thoughts fill our life....images fill our life...sounds fill our life....when our senses are shut down we sleep in the bed of fantasy...every sleep is a replica of death....every blink is a reversion to death....that's when we go inside....to ourselves,were the real universe resides.....exploring every nook and corner ...escaping from all our senses and link towards the outside world...which is full of pain and havoc...so submerge to the inside world were there is no pain to suffer....to be comfortably numb.....i am done here....you guys coming??".....these words from Joe had a  rhyme and blended beautifully in that night..
we actually were deeply thinking over what he was saying while he already jumped down from the hostel terrace to his inner world....the song "i have become comfortably numb" was playing in some recorder....our few seconds delay to fight back to consciousness cost our friend....after a pause ...there was noises all round....shouting ...alarm of ambulance.....tears....but all that time i was calm and i was inert upon his absence ....
now sitting in my room with a family and a highly paid job and plush to vane upon.....i miss something .....a comfortable numbness to sleep upon is missing..... and many a times in this busy life i miss my Joe, his music and his last words before silence......