The Metallic Buddha

I opened my eyes to a reflection of a lustrous metallic Buddha meditating, all the while floating like a ship on a gentle lagoon. Many colors bounced back from this image; my body seemed to absorb all the colors that surrounded me. A few questions that bothered my existence; why do I look like a metallic humanoid? What happened to me and my body? What is this calmness that I am feeling right now? Or is this all just a dream? I didn't find any answers for these, but I realized my location from this street sign board which read 'Pedestrian Plaza, NY Times Square'. I have now become this absurd humanoid; metallic fluids churning onto itself, taking on the appearance of a human body. A physical form beyond the usual flesh and bones. Their eyes hung out of their sockets as they see me, even I must have been like them. A Buddhist monk meditating in the middle of a crowd in itself is something absurd. Firstly, I am in this humanoid metallic Buddha and secondly, I am floating in the middle of New York Times Square; these events have equal potential in influencing a new wave of philosophies and scientific theories itself. Everyone around me got so scared and hostile that the air itself got viscous and wanted to strangle me down. This brief moment was followed by a stampede, when people somehow shook themselves out from this situation. Just like the revelation of the true nature of an imposter wolf in sheepskin and my true identity is exposed. Although even in this frenzied atmosphere, I felt like I was sitting by a river bank and sipping the ecstasy that was flowing in it. I never had felt this calm ever before like the calmness I used to feel while painting but now I am experiencing this whole new level of peace inside me. I wanted to believe that it was real and not a dream. Even after considering both the possibilities and I decided not to wake myself up if it were a dream. I didn't have any recent memory and it felt like I had experienced a thousand lives just a moment before, so I couldn't recollect why I was there. I had a few seconds to myself before most of them disenchanted themselves from something and started screaming their throats open followed by the stampede. I could hardly figure out what I was undergoing, but I was glad that I had thought of how I felt about myself just then. Suddenly I felt different and I could see myself in the reflection; I was glitching to and fro, from the current form to my human form. I was a relieved that it didn't take me very long to get back into my former self and blend in with the crowd. Nobody in the crowd knew what they were running from, for this guy comes up to me and says "Save your lives! The end is near and this is the end of this world" and blabbering other extreme orthodox stuff. Nothing affected me like it used to, I was smiling at the person, feeling pure bliss from within. I took a taxi and left for my apartment. I bumped into my neighbor who looked at me suspiciously. I think it was because I had ghosted on our usual sessions of conversing over a smoke, where we talked about art, culture and existentialism. We talked about our lives and how meaningless it is, our arguments on how mad can one be if madness is dependent on the perception of an ideal lifestyle in a society, or how much freedom can you taste in this world because nature is everything, and asks ourselves questions like "where should the boundaries be?", " On what basis should it be determined?", " Is everything just gray or should hurting someone be the boundary?". I was wrong to think that he was a free thinker, he was pretending to be one. To be honest he was scared of me; I knew it from the start and he had gotten scared of how I have been acting since last week, for I had isolated myself inside my room. When my other friends used to come by to knock on my door, everyone used to ask him. So, he was even more scared and asked me hesitantly if everything was alright. Or what was the reason for my isolation? Such were questions he asked whenever he saw me. He obviously did not want to get involved in this. I knew it as I walked past him by the corridor as if there was no one. I already had too much on my plate and I could not stand his fakeness anymore. I had to deal with an unsettling world full of things that had occurred after me leaving my apartment, so as usual I needed my smoke, the sky and the time with my thoughts. I lit a cigarette as soon as I reached my terrace and within no time my thoughts had drowned me. Closed rooms have always taken a toll on me, it gets harder to breathe and I tend to get lost in my thoughts, I was feeling extraordinarily calm then and I had no idea when this was going to wear off. But I had a feeling that this was different from the usual states I have been in, this didn't feel like a temporary thing. I traced back my memory. I realized that it all started when I got this crazy idea of painting myself, not as in painting my physical form, but I wanted to express the truest self of mine if it could be expressed in the form of art. My point in pursuing this idea was due to my depression and sadness all the time. I had read this spiritual book which said that it was because one has an unconscious self which is wild and untamed, that our unconscious self: a wild beast that attacks us when we are at our weakest and the solution to being happy is to tame that beast. I took a little more from it than what was needed. I had taken inspiration from crazy ideas in past like feathers, dogs, metro trains guards, and so on. So, this was also like an any other crazy idea I have had, I never thought it was an awful idea to paint that beast or to paint my unconscious self out on a canvas. Working on such ideas thrilled me as an artist, such ideas gave me a sense of uniqueness. It was thrilling for me so; I planned to work on it. I started developing ideas, asking questions to myself on painting a soul, how I can paint something so formless? And if I am able to, what colors should I use? I started with a canvas then it extended into two, three, and four, and then I started fixing canvases on my walls and cupboards and then, painted my whole apartment. For a week that I had shut myself in my apartment, ordered in takeout, that too, rarely, because of the trance I was in. But then I started exploring my inner-self. It was dark and unexplored like the ocean, but much wilder. Then only I started rethinking my idea to tame the beast because I realized how untameable that beast is and how vast my soul was. It was vast beyond comprehension. I was not looking out to see if it was day or night. I was feeling ecstatic and hence I thought that I spent months exploring myself but it was just a week in real-time, for inside my soul time varied and a week felt like a month. I thought about it because it is a different dimension altogether, so, things that influenced time didn't exist there like space and gravity. I was so excited that I was crazy about completing this art, but I was becoming hopeless day by day, draining myself without food or light. It was just darkness. There came a point when I gave up to my darkness, The moment I gave up, the beast pounced upon me and I was vulnerable and drowning in that dark ocean. I somehow mustered up the courage to shake myself from this paralysis, felt that I needed to get out and get some light and air. I was frozen cold on realizing what depression felt like, all my life I have kept up this act of being depressed; for the sake of a perception of my identity everyone had about me. Somehow, I carried my pathetic self out of the apartment. Although, soon I started regretting taking myself out to this super busy New York City. I was in the worst place possible in the whole world in my situation right now. I realized how helpless I felt in this cold city with just skyscrapers and hollow humans swarming everywhere, that a person on the verge of losing all hope couldn't even go for a hug to feel something. I was about to lose myself to the beast which had chased me and pinned me down, when it was about to go for the kill. I decided that I do not deserve to live in this pain anymore and that was something so powerful. It scared the beast, and suddenly, the tables turned. I was oozing out light and freedom. Embracing death gave me the freedom and calmness that I haven't felt. It was on a level beyond my comprehension. I rushed towards the nearest building, chased up the floors, and reached the terrace, and without a second thought, I went and dived into the air. I was falling, but the sense of freedom was growing in me exponentially. Suddenly I burst into this ocean of flower petals with many colors and fragrances. I floated over the city like a magical ocean, cleaning New York from all its stink and filling the city with more colors. And just before hitting the ground, all of that exploded and gathered in a metallic lustrous substance just emitting and reflecting light, absorbing whatever there was to absorb and offering whatever I could offer to this city. In the attempt to create an art of the beast I had in me, churning in and out in the Pedestrian Plaza at the center of NY Times Square. The ultimate expression of myself.