Origins

Someone asked me today, how long has it been. I

said, twenty four months, more or less,  depending on

the frame of reference. Or the question

you were asking. It might as well be twenty four years, or

more. What do I refer to here? My first heartbreak? The

first job which made be swing between ecstasy, anger

and despair? The time I was born? Who will bear witness

to the origins of sadness? Who will point a finger and say, ‘here. This

was where it started.’ A shady tree in an alternately sunny-rainy afternoon

is a convenient metaphor. There is nothing much to it:

an ability to invent realities at will. And any sadness

can be justified. I have a cause for my grief, hello-

this here is a picture of the girl; that night

when the parent talked till dawn; this evening

when I realized it was all lost. Evenings meant for

moping about do not offer solutions. There is nothing

to be said about this, really. There is no place where it starts, though

it might all end somewhere.

People

This morning, I was thinking of people

we meet once, ships in the night-time, exchanging

signals through the dark, and then

gone. This evening, I am thinking of people

we live with.

Sometimes, it seems, life

is one interminable traffic jam. All of us

anxious

to get away from each other. All of us

stuck, in the same space

we would rather not inhabit.

Taboo

There are topics one must never touch upon, matters

not open to discussion. As the nights go along, one

must never mention anything about any

emotional attachments. This world is startled

at this phrase, it creates awkward

situations.

At no time, should the word love be mentioned, as in

I loved you; or love you still. It causes raised

eyebrows. Such a quaint notion, not

at anytime should such things

like moonlit nights be recalled. Mockery, waste

of time. You are not here, and this is what

all of it is reduced to.

It comes with its benefits. You are not

here. So, I don’t have to care

about how full of smoke the house becomes

due to my smoking. I do not care about the

arrangement of the sheets and pillows now. Or if

they are clean. I still take the trash out,

every day. But the clink of

empty bottles- no one has to obsess over it,

now. Now that you are gone, I can stay awake till

early morning, and stare at the fan, cursing it

for moving too slowly. I can look at

the wafting smoke from my cigarettes, and

watch the plumes dissolve. Slowly, disappearing to leave

a poisonous shadow which cannot be remarked upon. Just

like my life.

Now that you are gone, I

can mourn you without you interrupting me. I can

be unloved, now that I no longer have your love. Now that you

are gone,

I can quit everything you quit me for.

But Never Again

I have read a lot of stories, and

written a few myself. There is no way

I can comfortably describe this plot; yours’, and mine;  there

are no roses drying on windowsills here, not

unless they are in waterless vases left

ignored for a lifetime. There is no struggle

to forget what did not happen, unless it

happens in a whiskey haze. There might or

might not be loss, this plot is

unclear on value. It is a strange story,

there are resonances of a past I might

or might not have lived through, of

silences which might actually have been

arguments.

This is a strange place to be in a story, one

where the road does not branch out, a mundane place

with only two options: forward, or back. And I, sweetheart,

have had enough of heartbreaks. So while I walk on, I

will do what I damn well should have done, a lot earlier.

I will walk on. (And occasionally turn back. But

don’t wait.)

Humor

‘So how do you tolerate

these evenings,’ she wants to know,

‘you know, when your head is full of a

thousand wet leaves, the stench of

this rotten past overlying everything, when

everything is too still to be real?  How do you

just keep on surviving; do you take it

one day at a time, living from hour

to hour? Do you think this game of breathe in-

breathe out is really a solution? What do you do when

everything seems to be stagnating

inside your head? How do you live through

those slit-your-wrists moments of anomie?’

She looks at me, as if I

am going to reveal a magic trick- as if I

am a jack about to leap out

from a box. I have no sharp, witty answer

to her questions, and frivolity

will not do, not for this

fellow traveler. I don’t know

what to tell her, till I hear myself

saying, ‘Oh, in the night, I mock myself

In the morning, everything is lost, anyway.’

Thinking You

I have been overthinking, or

so, I suspect, you will say. That I

worry too much, that I sleep too little, or

eat too less, or punctuate too badly. Or, maybe

that I am paranoid. And all of those sentences

might make sense.

I think I am afraid of that, a lot

of the time, I worry that that is what will

happen. And still, part of me rejoices when

you go away, angry and tired of me- now that you are not

Here, I can grieve your absence to

My heart’s content. I can give way

to longing, without thinking of the

borders it puts on me.

You know that I love you, and

you know that you are part of this enduring

melancholy you can never be part of, you

know that you will always try

to rein it in. Except, you did. And

it did not work. And now, you are angry, and

I am sorry. Both of us,

glum in our petty victories.

Tell Us About Feeling Lonely, Then.

‘Ok, then. Define being lonely.’

‘Oh, that is almost too easy. Are you trying to mock me?’

‘No. Go on. Define it.’

‘Which one do you want me talk about? The evenings when you come home to an empty, unkempt house, dust swirling with every footstep that you take, the smell of stale French toast left uneaten from the morning’s breakfast dogging every movement, the hum of the airconditioner like the taunt of a spinster aunt who wants the revenge for her uselessness in your companionship, the crazy creaking of the fan as it tries to deal with closed windows and rancid toast, or coldness of the frozen juice that seems tasteless against your lips? Does that excite your imagination, the flat out boredom of a thousand books crammed in too little bookshelf-space, the feeling of dread which comes at the very thought of reading them, the consternation which arrives at the thought of having to hate what you love or having to love what you hate, and not knowing which way around it is?’

‘You make being lonely sound like it comes in a brownpaper-wrapped package, couriered to you straight from a sixties movie set.’

‘What do you want to hear then? How much it is like white noise? How you stay awake at night at self-hate o’clock, wanting to throw your shoe at that creaking fan, then wishing you would? Chasing your past like a dog without a bone, willing to see it, and hating to see it in the darkness of the night, tugging at your pillow-face down, eyes closed? That a lonely person is a movie star who, during the day, wisecracks lines they adapt for sitcoms, who in the night gets drunk and mouths lines cloy enough to have been spoken by Bogart in Casablanca? ‘You know mister, when I was a young…’? Tinny pianos do feature in all our lives, but never gloriously, you know. It is mostly mundane. Silent nights spent sober and unsleepy; raging nights spent drunk and maudlin, nights nights nights…You can find the drama, if you want. It is not uninteresting.’

‘Now we are getting somewhere. Care to elaborate?’

‘Yeah. Fuck you. Over and over again. Say that to yourself a thousand times, and you might get some idea.’