Of late, there has been a lonesome doubt spouting in the uncertain void. However you may take it, as I wander into the coiled streets and encounter the feral vanguards and their minions, the radio wavelengths somehow find a way around me. And with the slightest whiff of cannabis, I am drawn back to one such claustrophobic stale evening that had bore a gradual tension on what we had assumed to be true previously.

Alas! That has all come to naught. For even in the basest level of mutual understanding, I seem to find unflinching resentment mired with eventual admiration. This may all come round to some form of a custom. But hasn’t that been the same for truth and lies? Lies have become facts, truth is rendered invisible, and exaggerations have become the gospel on the streets.

As the mannequin mandates lead the way, we seem to have arrived at a fanciful déjà-vu. And yet it reeks of indifferent astonishment. Even though it is thinly veiled, the air doesn’t smell the same. There have been relatively tall tales in a different time and yet at the same place. One intoxicating whiff of that earthy smell and it all comes full circle. It displaces the entire sense of regained familiarity. After all, the truth has always been malleable. It pervades. It wanders. It lingers.

Such is the direction percolating from the weary ligaments of a shallow evening.