I wandered Lonely as a cloud.

One night when it was sunny outside, I fell asleep running around in a playground so unfamiliar and unknown that I felt at home. I tripped over a ledge into the lap of a big mountain that had a face of a man I knew and did not remember who. I stretched out and crashed in a feline stance while the shrubs around lifted their bushy bottoms like skirts and rushed away on their woody toes, huffing and puffing throwing angry stares on me for disrupting the decorum of the place. I fled. I fell. And it wasn’t sunny anymore. I heard a siren call out and children rushed to play. My feet grew lighter as the walk turned brisk and I would never touch the ground again, but no one seemed to notice. The siren grew like silence as I started running while the rains started wetting my feet. I stopped and the silence was gone, the siren was gone. Now it was a distant familiar voice waving from a distance, calling out to me, ‘would you want some tea?’ I shouted back ‘Surely!’ and the voice was gone saying ‘be here in five’, but I don’t think I heard that. There was no playground now, and I was looking at myself from my back and sometimes from the front and side while I meandered the narrow tread onto a mountain placed in a place where it should not be, or had never been before. I was not thinking, just trekking it with ease, and yet the one who was watching my back, which was still me wondered that this is not supposed to be the way it is. And while I trekked on to the summit, the me left behind took my eyes off me and looked around and absorbed the striking similarity of the places I have been and the undecipherable amalgamation of all of them into what I was in. I was again in sight, now on top, when I blurted out, this isn’t real, it is a dream, shout, shout out loud, snap out of it, shout damn it. And while I tried to shout, my shouts were stifled and muted. There was this siren again, filling the place all over again, blurring everything, wanting me to jump, calling out loud. And while I did, the place starting folding like a crumpling paperwork, from between crevices of the mountain, from the plains, everywhere, and I fell, and yet…It wasn't night anymore.

 I pressed a button to turn off the snooze while Ma called out that tea was ready. Now I knew.