i dasn't tarry I dasn't tarry. Something grows within me, a dissatisfaction, a longing. Everyone needs affection, I'd said, Only I'd not said it so. I'd couched it in "a great human need," it's less personal that way. Gathered 'round the leviathan moronic babble, closely spaced on the sofas yet growing farther apart, live from Saturday night, away slips the childhood and we waste it on this pablum. But before, it was different; Oh Captain my Captain, he'd called, and I'd responded. Something within me replied to that keysong of youth. My confidante had asked about my dreams, and I'd not had such as she. I thought her foolish but now I feel it. Growing together around the honey sunset of a way of life -- carpe diem -- we bonded. And now, can it be over so soon? I was in the mood for a long walk and a conversation; my bullshit teenage angst would have no body count. Seize the day. And not much more often had I felt as lacking, as incomplete, as I did standing in that doorway, looking at Kim and Tom and Leah and Rosie and trying to fathom my uneasy emotions. I dasn't tarry. I left the half circle of light spilling out onto the porch, left behind the warm, mixed faces peering out into the night. They receded into the hallway and I looked up at a moonless black. The finger-trees just caught the rays from some obscure reflection from the house and trapped the stars in a cosmic yet earthly cat's cradle. I walked out to my car and the door shut and saw Leah going into the next room. Already this connection to my generation was fading and I was merely puzzled. I dasn't tarry, yet I long to stay. My childhood is so slowly slipping away. I want to travel the world on a motorcycle, talk with someone who understands. Engineering is how you live, says Keating, but poetry is what you live for. Life is passion, he says, and a craving for that passion is what I feel. I dasn't tarry, I go.

Manish Vij