I have a right to exist

I have a right to exist, he thought. Lately he has been having nightmares. In real time. Like now. The vultures swirled high above the ground, hawk-eyed, circling, waiting for the pray to spread-eagle in death and the burning sands below. Clumps of mesquites scattered between craters of sands extending miles all round the empty vastness. Wrong terrain for mesquites. No, not the terrain, the mindscape of the nightmare was not any Arizona desert, but what was once a city in the southern part of India. The stars and the standardized constellations over-head in the clear skies told his cerebral functions that fact. That was what disturbed him. A clear starry night in south of India and vultures overhead? Vultures in the night! It has to be a nightmare. He woke up, not with a start, for he had been through this surreal landscape that melts underneath his hurtling legs as the latter tried to outrun themselves and outpace the throbbing, pulsing heart that left a spicy feeling in his throat! Familiar feelings. Familiar landscapes reeling out fast and furious like those dissolving-into-each-other music video cuts. That was why he got up not with a start, but to analyse. It was four in the morning, his digital fm radio ricocheted. Groaning, wiping a single bead of cold sweat under his chin, he tried to turn around. The early morning affliction of youth, symbolized by the dent in the mid-section of the counterpane, was strangely there, in spite of a disturbing nightmare sequence. He tried to get back to sleep, secure in the thought of his masculinity, not totally fazed to not remember his fate where he cannot even lose the throb in the groin because of a bad dream! Where is life headed, anyway?

Sleep was not happening. After tossing and turning around for two yawning hours, he swung out of the counterpane, felt the momentary chill of the floor as his feet made contact with it. Reality hit him fuzzily at first, then the fists voluntarily bunched themselves to press the knuckles on to the half-closed eyebrows shielding ochred eyes from frayed nerves, frazzled mood and perturbed excuse for sleep. Slowly he stared the day like Kermit the Frog, not sure whether to lose himself into the slanted rays that have fallen on the floor, spotlighting the zillions of dancing worms of dust, through the excuse for trellises on his single window, or to delve deeply into the philosophy behind the agony of having to make his own morning coffee over an unbrushed foul tasting mouth of his own!

Clap... Lap... Dissolve...