Short story.
Once upon a time, somewhere in the dusky yesteryear around 2017, it was my 20th birthday. I was with my close friend that I discerned to be trustworthy and transparent to my myopic eye when it comes to being a reader of minds. But the shitty human skull is encrypted, sneaky and way too deceitful. Impenetrable like the dark waters at the valley of death, is a betrayer's friendly arm around your shoulder.
It was a phenomenal move to my psyche, to keep my fingers acquainted with my hand, which was knitting a web of friends, who I deemed close enough to be in my inner circle.
But this rabbit hole led to the snake's nest, and the eggs being laid by the minute by this beaming farce, a forged smile of innocence was appalling to my vulnerable skin.
So, it was just me and my childhood acquaintance gradually grown companion Ben (Pseudonym), brisking through the sidewalk.
To my guilty gut, on my gleeful day of great momentousness, there came an old owl with a treasured message primed & brushed with wisdom in its beak.
The supernatural realm spawned an old disabled whistle-blower to the phony oncoming murderous sabotaging trucks, a future stencil cutting my rough gullible edges, before I'm vociferously knocked out of the racetrack by this covert constricting serpent, who I called "a friend."
This scrawny disabled beggar was a burly witted man, with blitzing thoughts from the divine.
I was strolling around the entrance of my school, with a helmet of bittersweet nostalgia, gathering the refracted light from the changes I seemed to soak in from back when I was a kid, to an overlapping scenic shift, as the beggar popped this enchanting bubble of timeless nostalgic hypnosis.
Delighted to speak to the man and know his vivid take on life, visually arrested by my countenance, this man did his dichotomous separation of my friendship, in a scale of time, the pencil nib was destined to be obliterated by a Frenemy's true boisterous acts of a vindictive knife when placed on the fires of watching me scale my personal mountains of elation and progress.
My friend and I stood as the old man expounded, he exclaimed in a state of alarmed cognizance and clairvoyance, as he urged me to cut and run, before it was too late, and my fluid boundaries would be inundating with snakes in close quarters.
Enamored by his conviction, we procured him a significantly sizeable bag of supper, warming ourselves in the mercurial fire of his unapologetic inferences foretelling the destined rift between supposed friends, in the inevitable and evincing sands of time.
The eleventh hour, closing moments of truth in the night before the clock struck 12.
I extrapolated, the old man had senses spanning through the winds of time, knowing patterns and honed a panoramic view of matters that lay before him to lay bare and exfoliate for all to see.
But the lens blur on a myopic youth of today, a vain, impulsive, reckless and pompous eyed view stuck in a mode no extraneous than a portrait in a fishbowl.
So, me and Ben were seemingly tight at the time, but the poor man, looked at me intently and began speaking a grotesque future in a brutally truthful manner.
He said in Hindi, "Kid, keep your so-called friends at a distance. Do not let a friend into your house, cuff him to the doormat, be wise and always protect your interests, your personal exploits & vaults."
Perhaps, his advice stuck with me, and I subconsciously waited for his words to stand the test of time. Perhaps, I would be able to shrug away this dystopian view of things, which was the brutal nature of truth and reality in this world of petty cruelties, waiting for an opportunity to turn sinister and abominable by the second.
Inadvertently to my astonishment, as I engined through my life, the words turned surgical scissors, making incisions to proceed onto a metamorphosis circumventing a probable casualty.
By forced exfoliating milestones, a bunch of bogies, begin to vanish and made way for new trustworthy and like-vibing compartments. The game began to viciously oppose my preemptive moves of defiance to being a casualty on the tracks, rather than an obliterating and power radiating engine.
A brood of the bogies tried to derail my engine of life whilst keeping theirs encumbered on course.
A bunch of bogies/snakes tried to infiltrate and invade my train or dispossess me of my compartments to be under their engine/self-interest feigning a noble or altruistic cause.
Snakes in the grass every single one of them.
This man was awe-snappingly correct and profound in his dark poetic, rhapsodic, bonafide advice.
Today me and that friend are strangers; in a state of obsoletion did he get left behind, because of the radical failures in tiny tests of loyalty and truth. But me and that old man are still friends in my memory for the advice.
At that point, I thought to myself, what can a lousy man on the street advise me about discerning people, it got him on the footpath near the entrance of the school "I went to". Loser.
But he was a spectacular spectacle of a successful destiny on a footpath, supernally comprehending the crevices of hard grounded reality and created more value than most megalomaniacal emperors do.
I walked away pensive & perturbed, contemplating his story (not disclosing it here), this man has no feet yet pans his vision to survive scoundrels who pose as friends to reap a harvest achieved by a cheap shot.
But my eyes, the adolescent glassy dots of delusion lay uninstrumental in my sockets.
Donning a knackering lens of denial, I'm choosing to dull down my truthful vision and be dissuaded by following a deceptive front portrayed by anyone who shakes a hand with me.
What a lousy man I found myself to be in this pursuit of truth and that man had the eventual winning point after much pondering.
A lot changed, I seeked to collide life paths with the man, but like an eclipse to my thoughts, in a dark cataclysmic moment of incidence he was gone, never to return.
But being a truther, truly enabled my vision, a surgical transfiguration to honing an honest eye, that sees not through the keyholes of denial, refrains from opening up to serpents looking to strangulate your destiny at the cusp of promotion.
I thank the Creator for that destined encounter with a wise old man, who ascended through this plane of existence, spreading potent anti-venom of truth as he traversed through this realm of darkness & deceit.
Eagles fly alone, they fly high.
They're solitary birds making a friend or two, only with the ones who are up for the pace, altitude & transparency it looks to embrace.
Otherwise, untethered, unapologetically gliding it's ruling the sky by itself.
Don't mistake a phony pigeon for an eagle. Cast him midair in the sky and you'll know the phony feathers he's made off at an altitude he seeks to float at your wingspense. (Expense)
An incentive for the fluttering & flustering pigeons, to lower the skies of an indomitable eagle.