I read numerous short stories today, all written by Indian writers. As I read them one by one, I was consumed by this fervent rage to read as much as I could, as if I had no more time to live and soon it would be all over and I would not know what all these stories conveyed to people like me all over the world. I gobbled them up one by one, allowing the emotions of each one to them to burn inside of me, surge through my veins, and lead on to reach my head. They seared through me, pulsating blood onto every inch of my body, as if I had been running non-stop for days on end. It felt like I was finally beginning to learn how to breathe again. The words striking the right chords, the images from each story turning back time in my head and with every emotion bouncing off my chest I began to question the real emotions in my life. My past, my present, my experiences, leading me to question everything in my life so far. Soon my head hurt. A volley of memories rolled past me and I cringed at the grinding accusations and the revelations of my soul.

Slowly and surely I lowered myself in the river of my past, floating past every nook and corner, searching for something to hook onto. Searching and manoeuvering myself into each emotion, I soon began to dream. Day dream a story of my own making. A dream intermingled with emotions of my own; with characters and their lives, their fragilities and their nuances, their trysts with love and declarations, and their struggle to come to terms with themselves.

I emerged from the river, still devouring yet calm. Unlike the fervour with which I read all those stories, I somehow didn't feel the need to write this down. The stories that I read, formed spaces in my head and remained there for sometime, floating in and out as they pleased. Yet this one stays with me, festering onto my thoughts and growing by itself, feeding on what I read and forming its own set of emotions, some new or some old. It didn't matter. What mattered was the hope that it filled me with. The hope that this mere dream of mine might someday find itself in pages for someone else to read and fill them with emotions and dreams of their own, just as I have found something of my own from someone else's words.