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Spring Is About To End

Spring Is About To End

High Time For Answers

-Ashish

Spring is about to end. The visitors had a good time and its time they return back to their reality. At breakfast they say that they would like to come back next year. Nearly all guest say the same thing when they go. A few faithfully return but for the most of them once is enough. ‘Overlook hotel’ has the most beautiful view of the valley in the whole County. Chilling weather with a huge shower of snow was a surprise for the new guests. There is an old graveyard on the road back of the hotel, nearly 1 mile away.

Every Saturday I take a walk to the burial ground through the dead silent road. I sit next to the tombstone of Mrs. Whiteman. For now, she is in some sort of solitary confinement. I really want to dig deep in the ground to look for her and find out what’s really going on down there. Death no more lives here, as according to the records since last three years not a single corpse has been here. But there is an office, Register’s office with a toothless old man. He sits on the creaking chair with a huge blank register and is waiting for something that I don’t understand.

Mr. Whiteman is the caretaker of this hotel. My relationship with father is kind of dry. Since mother left we both have stopped talking to each other. But there is this one conversation that I just can’t forget- one fine day when I was around 7 years old I was upset about the fact that these guest would come here and live here for a limited period of time just enough to get comfortable with me and one morning they would just leave. I asked my father,” papa why don’t they stay here forever? Why do they leave? If they want to leave then why do they come here in the first place?” To which my father replied” Maybe you won’t understand this thing, but you are trying to find answers in an answer less world”

I Samantha Whiteman will be 19 by the next month. Growing up away from the city and technology there were only three things assigned to my routine- collage (which is approximately 2 hours away from the County), food and books. Collage and food are both fine but it was the books that manipulated my psyche.

 Father being a retired philosophy professor had brought in a lot of Jean Paul Sartre, Plato, Aristotle, Friedrich Nietzsche, et cetera. At the age of 17 Plato taught me a lot about respect, power, art, democracy, politics and money. But it was the books of Jean Paul and Nietzsche who would usually baffle me up and they still continue to with their existential quotes. There were in total four authors who wrote about existence. It’s a bit difficult to pronounce the name of other two but in my mind I just made up a team or group known as existential brothers. What is the purpose of my existence? What is the purpose of this whole life form? These are the two questions that are required to be answered, but in practical life there is only one man with whom I can discuss i.e. Mr. Whiteman but we don’t talk anymore. Friend is a sort of alien word for me; teenagers in the collages are mostly interested in money, violence, sex. I have made up this perception that all my comrades are dead but we still have a conversation through these books. I ask the questions and these pages provide me with a solution but no answer.


I guess this short is an amalgamation of voices inside my mind that I fear people won’t understand, like this entry has no purpose, but what if I told you that god made the universe or our world or us, without any particular purpose.

Giving meaning to all these things, that's just not in his job description.


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