Author: Arv Nagar, Class X G
When the lights go out—every single one—
There’s a solace you can’t replicate:
Complete darkness, complete silence.
You flip your own switch, and it’s nothing like that.
Turn off your room, your house, your street;
Still, somewhere, a window glows.
You could sabotage the transformer,
Sever every cable in town.
Fiat tenebrae.
But across the street, the wires hum,
Streetlights burn like Sisyphus pushing uphill,
The neighbor’s TV flickering as if a static hymn.
This is your Rubicon: you cannot extinguish the world.
Xerxes ordered the sea be whipped for destroying his bridges;
The sea shrugged.
Canute commanded the waves, “Stop!”,
And they kept coming,
And soaked his feet.
There was a time before Edison,
Before Prometheus stole fire,
When night was unconquerable, incontestable.
But even then—stars.
Even then, someone is keeping vigil by a flame.
Chaos speaks every language; chaos is fluent.
Perhaps this isn’t failure, but clarity—
You are not Atlas.
The celestial sphere will rotate without your shoulders.
Lights burn in defiance of your exhaustion,
And in this memento non omnipotens,
There’s something almost akin to acceptance.
The lights stay on.
C’est la vie.
The world turns its luminous carousel while you sit in the dark,
You can control—YOUR room, YOUR light, YOUR life
Herculean ambitions; reckless abandon, and I find it almost enough.
