Five senses

“Do you have feelings?” she asked.

He was a bit perplexed with this seemingly innocuous question: “What do you mean? Everybody has feelings.”

“I mean, do you ever pause, reflect inwards, and try to recognize how you are feeling?” she explained her question and converted it into a leading one, perhaps sensing that she already had her answer.

“I still don’t get it,” he stood awkwardly, bewildered.

She began her erudite response: “You see, this is what social conditioning does to you. Your culture never prepared you to answer the simple question: how am I feeling today? In all these years, you could never develop the faculties that can parse the happy moments from the deluge of mindless ones, until someone else validates them for you. You cannot tell you are feeling like shit, until your body revolts and makes you restless. You never learnt paying attention to yourself and communicating with your soul.”

He fumbled for a befitting response, but the best he could come up with was a counter-question: “Do you feel?”

“You might not have paid attention. But I know when I am too cold, or too hot. My heart feels deep blue in peace, amber in distress, and the color of the forest in joy. I know when I am the elixir, and I know when I am the toxin. I bubble, I swirl, I rise, and I fall; I breathe life, and I am life. I am the wave of the poet’s finest imagination as well as of the sailor’s worst nightmare. I am the…”

“Thanks for giving me a headache,” he interrupted her flow by turning off the faucet of the water purifier. “I will now pour you in a tray, keep it in the deep freezer, and use you this evening to fix my drink. That's what I feel like.”