Looking back

In our childhood, we used to read stories in which a prince while going on some expedition was advised by a sage; never to look back otherwise he would be petrified.
Same holds true in real life. Despite all distractions one shouldn’t look back. We all have some nostalgic feelings for the past. We long to visit those places full of pleasant memories for us. To go and relive and experience those moments of bliss once again.

Many a times we are disappointed.
Those places are not the same, at least for us. The people we look far are long gone, those voices faded years ago. It is like visiting a haunted place charming us to come forward and we in its spell become oblivious of a deep chasm of time and space developed; separating us from those memories of yesteryears.
Times we are looking far are lost somewhere, never to be recovered and the people without whom life seemed impossible once; are nowhere to be seen.
The lights, laughter, cries of joys and visions full of hope and ambitions are found to be replaced by closed forbidding doors, dark, cold places with no one to wait for us or welcome us on arrival. Rooms empty with echo of our own footsteps, things once collected with fondness covered in thick dust of time.
Deep inside we all know that no one invited us there and there would be no one to see us off with eyes dim with emotions and appeals to come back again as early as possible.
Deep in anguish, we go out to search for something familiar, someone known to us but faces seem strange, blurred. Shops and bazars though full of lights and hustle bustle of humanity, feel devoid of spirit, figures moving in a thick haze of alienation, unrecognizable. Everything seems to swim in an ocean of unreality.
In despair one retreats to the silence of darkness. In the distance, call of Muezzin opens a floodgate of bitter/ sweat memories and increase the feeling of loneliness.
Time to go out and leave this place to avoid being shattered with grief!
Is it really possible to do so and shed part of us?
Maybe one is already petrified by carrying those relics of the past within one’s soul all the time.