Pulse

A few moments before I began writing this piece, the concept of pulsars caught my fascination. Pulsars, those celestial bodies that emit electromagnetic radiations at very precise intervals, according to the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article on pulsars, can rival atomic clocks in terms of the accuracy of their periodicity. Now, if my fascination for pulsars could sustain itself for any longer, this post would turn a lot of scientific heads in a matter of say, 5 years. But no one has that kind of liberty with time, I suppose. Besides, very few things seem to keep me fascinated. Chuck that! Moving on!

A pulse could be in the small movement of your throbbing vein on your wrist, the Carotid artery in your neck or somewhere between the ridges of your collar bone. A pulse could be in all the same places mentioned above. But feel them after you're done being chased by a mob of angry people. Specially when you have no clue why you were being chased in the first place.

A pulse could last a second. It could last for as short as a millisecond. It could be as long as you want it to last. It could be erratic, completely out of control, wreaking havoc everywhere. A pulse could be the biggest explosion that has the necessary intensity to destroy our planet, even the entire universe, or everything. What might remain is nothing. Zero. Zilch!

Imagine a tap. It's leaking. Drop by drop. Hear each drop as it traverses from the tip of the tap to the ground below. It's a small sound. But if you are sleeping, that constant, repetitive noise is more than capable of keeping you up all night.

Ever seen the ripples that the drop makes when it hits the ground? It creates an entire zone, almost circular in shape, all around its point of contact with the ground.    

Now consider yourself as a microscopic organism. You don't need to sprout tentacles. Just imagine yourself of a size a thousandth of the drop that falls off the tap. You're standing right below the falling drop. I leave the rest to your imagination.

I think of the word pulse, and the next word to come to mind is the word impulse. That crazy rush of whatever feeling it is that wants to explode out from every pore in your skin.  It's like a crack in a dam, a small crevice that becomes big enough to ensure the collapse of the entire barrier at a moment's notice. 

Think of the water that was being held behind that wall all this time. For the amount of force it could unleash into its surroundings, just because a small crack couldn't hold onto itself, it is unimaginable how the water was imploding upon itself for the time the wall kept the water from going anywhere. 

There are things you can control. Then there are things  that you think you can control. Then of course, there are things that you cannot control. Finally, there is a realization, seldom albeit, that there's little that one can control. Thoughts, abstractions, imaginations, feelings,  all pop up in the mind, some with a ferocity that leave you dazed. Watch them take control over you, and you'll do and feel things that you never thought were possible. Some sensations are so overpowering that they leave you caught in a rut, not letting you know when to stop, let alone allowing you to remember how and when it all started. It feels like a mad surge of nothingness. Like moving in empty space at the speed of light. You wouldn't even know that you're moving. There's a strip of road moving beneath your feet. You've been running all out forever. But the surroundings just don't seem to change, no matter what. 

Suddenly, a feeling just crept up in mind. Words may not be the best way to communicate thought. It could be that I do not know the words that I could string together to spell out what's inside my mind. But it could also be that language has limitations of its own. How is it that two people sitting within inches of each other could be talking to each other, but the things running within their heads are two worlds apart? For all you know, one might be altogether blank, from some sort of a vacuum created within, while the other mind is throwing up all things incomprehensible to itself? If the two worlds in question are so far apart at such close proximity, they probably accelerate towards each other, heading for a collision course, the moment they start moving apart physically. That collision happens in a pulse. And worlds are set ablaze.