The Thief

The thief crept in stealthily while I slept and raided my world. He took away all that had ever been mine....my house, my belongings, my wallet, my car, my jewellery. If value can be traced beyond material possessions, then the thief, by masterful craft broke into the safety vault that held my dreams, my memories, my love. He usurped them all.

And as I shifted uneasily in that restless zone between wake and sleep, he wrestled with my fortune and discovered the key that opened the door to my name, my honour, my colourful trophies from moments in life. Oh how I prized them! They were my souvenirs displayed behind the glass doors of the show case of life. The thief left the glass untouched; he simply opened the door and took away the symbols that contained so many victories!

I wondered in my disturbed dreams if there was anything left, anything that the thief might have overlooked....and as I thought so, he came to me and with the passionate devotion of a lover, he stripped me one by one of all the layers of clothes that had so carefully hidden my naked self and given it the illusion of an ‘image’. With my clothes, he unravelled layers of my persona, my deepest fears, my greatest hopes, my wildest fantasies.

I wondered why I stopped dreaming. There was nothing left now. No dream to paint my sleep, no visions, no voices. There should have been a void. But the thief was a skilled expert. He filled up the entire void with an endearing feeling of peace. The peace crippled me. It humbled me. I felt incapable of panicking, though my world and I were stripped.

The thief washed away my life in one night. And when I woke up in the morning, blinking in the sunlight, I realised that the Sun was still shining in my world. And then I opened my eyes fully to see a beautiful treasure that he had left for me.

I knew then that I had traded my world for freedom. And in that freedom reigned the only love that could never be stolen, as it could never be owned.