Making Sense Of Nonsense

wrote this for the Inter Hall English Creative Writing. :)

MAKING SENSE OF NONSENSE

"Mr. Walter! Mr. Walter! Come back here I request you for god's sake!"
But Mr. Walter swings his head like a pendulum, apparently to say no and keeps walking towards the huge front gates, staggering and swaying to keep balance. I hold back my urge to shout again and run after him. Moments later, standing and staring into his drooping, yet excitingly childish eyes, I felt helpless like never before. He used to remind me of how incapable I was to help him. He was panting, groping for breath, straining his lungs for some air. Walked too hard for his age I guess.

"Where were you headed Mr. Cherry Head?", I asked him jokingly, trying to smile as I said it. He let his lips widen into a happy arc and leak out a sudden little bout of laughter, hearing the words 'Cherry Head'. His red, although scanty hair were a matter of amusement for all the inmates! Oh how he loved his smooth shiny strands! Mr. Walter had made a lot of friends over the time that he had been staying here, some because of his cherry-red hair, and some with his famous 'bouts of laughter'.

"My daughter! She called me yesterday! She asked me to meet her at The Square.", he said, with a mix of surprised happiness and urgency on his face. I tried hard to nod to him in agreement and said, "Yes Mr. Walter, I know she called. And she is already here today! Waiting for you in the hall! Ah she'll be so happy to see you! Lets walk back, she has been waiting for you for so long." He went merry in a circle with his hands flung up in pleasure and a smile covering the whole of his wrinkled face!

Mr. Walter had been a successful man in his life. A furniture business that spread to nearby towns, a magnificient two storey house with a small garden in the frontyard, a lovely wife whom he had loved more than half his life, and the most beautiful daughter in the world whom he had married off to a young lad from the neighbour town. His life couldn't be more satisfying. But god is a selfish being. He takes away good people for himself. He killed Mr. Walter's daughter. She was hit to mortality in a car accident while with her husband. They were to take her pregnancy report from the hospital. The reports had been positive.

Constraint is possibly the greatest virtue in life. And Mr. Walter was a victim of the lack of it. Time had made him an old man with a weak heart, and the detailed phone call from his daughter's husband proved fatal to his weak pulses. This jolt sucked all sanity out of Mr. Walter. He fell on the floor and went unconscious.

Sleeping on the soft white bed of his hospital ward, he looked perfectly healthy, and his face so resolved of all worries, devoid of any thought or complication. Three days later he was shifted here, among other inmates, who all shared the common trait. He had been declared insane.

We walked together, me and Mr. Walter, towards the compound, where no one was waiting for him, not his daughter, not anyone else. But it wouldn't matter. Before even reaching the compound, he would forget every second of the day that had passed.

These were not mad people, Mr. Walters and everyone. They were just living somewhere else, somewhere inside their minds, far away from the world outside.

And I make sense of them.