The songs in your voice, the magic in your laugh.
The warmth of your bosom, the tenderness in your touch.
Your eyes, your moans, your restlessness,
The taste of your mouth, the aroma of your flesh.
Time standing still in your embrace, heart beating against the chest like cymbals.
At any moment, in any hour, helplessness,
With the blink an eyelid, in a sudden flash, trepidation.
With you, without you, a war rages;
Loosely held by the flimsiest thread of sanity.
Painfully swinging in the moments of our togetherness,
With arms open wide trying to snatch you from lost time.
Each passing day, reality slitting the throat of innocence,
A sharp razor cutting through the flesh of life.
A sad scary primitive song,
Wildly composing itself in the din of this loveless night.
The voices in my head are insanely loud these days. So loud that I can’t hear myself. This inability to hear myself at times are the best of times and the worst of times. I like it because I am able to fool myself and believe almost anything I want. I am able to dream. I am able to see her.
She first appeared after I had passed out from drinking too much. I had just won a prize for a poem in the local newspaper. The poem was about a boy who wanted to commit suicide. He walked everyday to a cliff nearby, stood at the edge of the cliff, but could never take the last step to an eternal fall. One day while coming back from the cliff a truck hit him and he died.
*
I was standing at the same cliff of my poem. I saw her on the other edge of that horizon. At the actual suicide point. Her gaze was fixed into the infinite expanse of that awakening flora. The morning breeze played with her hair and curled below her ear. Her figure stirred and rocked back and forth.
“Beautiful view. No wonder people want to jump the moment they see this.” She didn’t move. “It has the reputation of being a suicide point. It has taken the lives of more than a dozen people. I guess they are right. Beauty can kill you.” She looked at me for the first time after several minutes.
“It’s not true. If you are really looking at this, with all the heart in you, you can’t kill yourself. You won’t be able to see it again then.”
“You come here often? What place is this?
“I don’t know. It looks familiar.”
“Do you know you have a very incendiary aura?” Smiles. “It’s like a spark runs rapidly through my blood every time you look at me. You know the kind when you click the kitchen lighter on your finger.”
*
“And then what?”
“Then I woke up.”
“Was he good looking?”
“I don’t remember. I just have that feeling of being possessed by some whispers in my head that keep repeating themselves over and over. Incendiary. I clearly remember that word. I have never seen a dream in which I’m conversing. Dreams are almost always without any sound. Isn’t it? You remember colors, maybe a face more clearly, a déjà vu at some situation, but not a sound.”
*
“So you told him about our kiss?”
“Of course.”
“And how did you describe it?”
“I told him that you kiss like an adolescent.”
“Breaks my heart.” She started laughing.
I kissed her on her laughing lips. She laughed more. The car raced in the dark. There was no light. Only her laughter echoed on that empty highway. She was wearing something black.. Again. Something shone on her finger.
“What’s this?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen it before. I can hardly feel its weight. It’s like inside the skin. Your eyes look bluer. What’s happening to us?”
*
“What’s wrong?”
“Why do you think anything is wrong?”
“You are singing. There is a spring in your step. You have stopped whining about not being able to write.”
“Oh come on. I sing all the time.”
“Tell me.”
“I’ve met someone. And I’m not going to say anymore than that.”
“So typical.”
“No, you won’t understand.”
*
“Why didn’t you tell her? She was wearing a very blazing blue.
“She would’ve laughed like crazy and asked me to take some medication. And I was afraid.”
“Why?”
“What if this spell breaks?”
“You cannot control it. It’ll last as long as it has to last.”
“I don’t want this to end. Hey, your wrist is shinier than the last time.”
“Yeah I saw it. And your eyes are almost like they had been painted.”
“This is a very nice place.”
“This reminds me of a painting from childhood. It had this exact similar setting. A road amongst tall trees lined on both sides.”
“There are dozens of paintings like that.”
“Can you recall when you arrived here?”
“No. You?” I shook my head.
*
“I like his agitation within. I can feel it in almost everything he does.”
“And you guys did it?”
“I think we did. I don’t remember the details but I remember us running trying to find a proper place and then his eyes trying to take me all in one go. He doesn’t looks away for even once. Even when I’m not looking at him I can fee his eyes on me.”
“I’m so jealous of you. Happens every time you go to sleep?”
“Somewhere in the last hours of sleep. Around dawn. I think he is a writer. He talks like a poet.”
*
…And they ran for six days and nights and slept on all fours at the crack of dawn in that vast jungle.
“It’s a beautiful story. You write beautifully.”
“I think I’m one dimensional. Limited.”
We had water all around us today. A fog was settling in. She was wrapped in a white satin gown.
“Do you love him?”
“I don’t know. I thought I did.”
“You are probably sleeping with him right now?”
“I think so. Why do you look upset?”
“I’m not upset. I don’t understand you.”
“You are also in a relationship?”
“Not anymore.”
“When?”
“Last night. I called her by your name.” Laughs.
“I’m not in a laughing kind of mood.” Laughs more.
*
“I don’t believe this. You are telling me that you dream about the same girl every night in your dreams. You guys go on drives, kiss, and talk like forever.”
“Why is this so hard to believe? Isn't every relationship a dream before you say "I love you"? And what happens to that dream after that? Have you seen such calm on my face before. I noticed it this morning in the mirror.”
“And what about us?”
*
“And then?”
“She said I was impossible”.
“And?”
“And that I’m the biggest fool to be in love with a dream.”
“And what did you say?”
“Aren’t we all. She didn’t know that.”
“What?”
“That I wasn’t in love with her.”
“So how will this end?”
“I’m thinking about having one last sleep.”
*
“So he’ll kill himself?”
“That’s what he said.”
“And you’ll kill yourself too?”
“He said I don’t have to if I don’t want to. He’s the one choosing a dream. I might have second thoughts about it. And that’s alright with him.”
“So you are not going to.”
“I cannot decide.”
“Why is the idea so appealing? I mean think about it. We have been together for three years. I know it’s not an out of the world thing but we are good together. And even if you don’t want to live with me anymore, that’s fine. But this is madness.”
*
The breeze was never more perfect. Each gust filled me with new flavors of life. What does one call it? The setting was like a movie set. I was standing at the end of the world. With all the heart in me, I was here. I had emptied the entire bottle of my sleeping pills. There was not a trace of any weight left in me. This was not a dream. This was something else. And then I saw her walking towards me. And the life after life was about to begin. But she didn’t look happy. She was wearing red today. My favorite color.
*
“Where am I?”
“You were in a coma for 45 minutes.” A doctor said to me.
“Who brought me here?”
“Your landlord saw your body through the window.” My landlord was standing right next to the doc smiling.
I slept again. And again. And again. But there was no dream. There was no her.
And then one day I saw her. It was someone who could’ve been her. She was sitting in a park. It was not her face. It was her hand. She was playing with something. It was a ring in her finger. The one that was so indecipherable in my dreams.
The greatest beauty about life is that it is perishable. What once was will never be. And I guess that is the reason why we are more concerned about self-destruction than living.
There is nothing masochistic about it. That’s the way it is supposed to be.
Think hard and try to remember what you wanted from life. Is there a thing that you really wanted and never got? No I’m not saying that there is a choice. Oh sorry to burst the bubble on you, but yes you don’t have a choice. Did you choose to live? Or can you choose to die? What was it that gave you happiness? What is it that makes you sad? Aren’t they all really the same? What are you really attracted to? What or who is your kick? Why are we all who we are? Who are we? Did you really decide the clothes you are wearing right now? Are you happy with it? Or does it make you sad that your t-shirt is not Nike? Or how happy will you really be if it was? You picked the clothes you are wearing right now because the other ones were not looking as good.
Not that you really liked it.
We are all chasing ourselves. A life we once lived. We are witnessing that exact same repetition day in and day out. I guess that is why this déjà vu is so prevalent.
There is some liquid in our nerve that wants us to go back and forth to each and every moment lived. That’s the real kick. To pile on moments. And since we cannot remember a great deal, due to a shitty memory, we are unhappy.
You already know what you can have and your mind tricks you into believing that that’s what you really wanted.
I hate to say this but I’m no sage. And if I’m writing about it, it exists.
The real door that you can open, the only door available, is the one to memory. You cannot see the future. You can only see the past. And that is why you keep living. That is why you want this moment to be grand. That is what all that “live this moment” crap comes from. But what is so livable about it?
The idea that one day you’ll open that door and find something that you always wanted to do and did.
A careless comment in the past makes you believe that you are intelligent. A couple of lines scribbled at the back of some book make you believe yourself to be a poet. A character in a movie jerking off after looking at the picture of the writer he’s reading makes you feel grand because its part of you. Everybody does that. Everyone, who is someone now, was or is, as stupid and as sad, as you are now or will be.
However stupid or bane your childhood was, it appears a novelty. The slightest reproduction of those images brings a smile on your face.
But can you really reproduce those images? What can you remember vividly? Now, come on. Think hard. Can you recall your face from two years back without looking at a photograph? Your own bloody face that you’ve lived with every single day of your life.
Let’s take the example of your most treasured moment in life. Can you recall that? Now, be specific. Which is that moment that really sticks out? That recalls every detail. Every hue and odor. That tinkling of the laughter. That stench of guilt. You can’t remember it, can you? See, perishable.
But don’t worry too much. I wouldn’t if I was you. Just sit back and take a deep breadth. It’ll all be over before you know it. All that trouble, all the heaviness and the lightness, all these insecurities will flush down the drain in a dream’s notice.
And that my friend, will be the end of you.
A phantasmagoric expedition of a volatile and incomprehensible juxtaposition of two people’s lives.
Riding in a Vikram (a three wheeled uncomfortable vehicle used for mass transportation in smaller cities) she’s sitting right next to me. It’s around 2 am on an intoxicating February morning and we are returning from one village to another. Though it is only a 10kms ride, it seems a journey from the orient to the occident, or such is the nature of my belief. The periodic jerks of our ride notwithstanding, I’m drenched from tip to toe in a perpetual high. So elevated are my senses that I’m unable to see the quarter of a dozen folks sitting right in front of us, noticing my agitation or the electricity in the air, I’m not sure.
The chill allows me to slip my hand underneath the common bed sheet that we’ve wrapped around ourselves. Her warm right thigh is cutting against my left one, which I’m shaking inconspicuously to fell just a bit more in that temperate explosion which is taking shape inside me , piercing the ligaments of my muscles. Powered by an insurmountable vertigo my hand reached her bosom, via her belly. Placed between the two cotton clothes, I can feel her heartbeat racing with the blood, faster at times, mellowed at others.
The caresses mutate into something deeper as my palm turns warmer with every passing second and the top surface was still fighting the cold. Audacity gave way to intimacy and intimacy gave way to a strange desire that is not exactly lust.
The ride did end eventually and we reached our destination. My hand came back to its equilibrium though somewhere inside me, the warmth was still trying to escape but something kept holding it back.
It has been two hours since the ride and everybody is fast asleep except the two of us. We are lying in a room that is filled with eyes and thoughts. Though the eyes are closed but I am not sure about the thoughts. Of course, they are not asleep. Thoughts never sleep. Are they asleep or just pretending, waiting for me to make a move. When I start galloping on intimacy I loose track of every other feeling, activity, or the situation around me.
“Is she awake and thinking the same as me?” is the only question in my mind.
After about half an hour of this tussle within me and conquering all the vulnerability inside me, I move my hand across an unconscious lady over to her side. My index finger makes way to her palm and her index finger responds to it. I bend over her side while my frame rests over the lady in between us and my lips touch her cheek. After being tilted for about 3-4 minutes I decide to move on her side but the space between her and the lady is not sufficient enough to accommodate me. She moves slightly against the wall and I move over her with the upper part of my structure swinging over hers, and the lower one on the floor. My mouth instantly moves over hers as I feel her lips below mine. My lower lip tearing in between hers and my left hand pressed against her cheek. I can smell my breath on her lips fused with some of hers. Within a few seconds we feel out of breath and start panting over each others mouth. Warm, inviting, pursuant air blown out in acknowledgement of our artlessness.
That exhaustion makes way with the most slackly used phrase in the world “I love you so much” said at the weirdest moment one can imagine and a prolonged liaison is born. A liaison that will last till the two of them will remain within each other’s vicinity. Or more effective when they are away from each other contemplating about moments like these which was transcendence for more reasons than can rhyme.
Still we are able to make it into the same room without the slightest bit of apprehension as far as the rest of the gentry are concerned while a storm of anxiety rages within us. Sometimes it’s the storm of the same perpetual high that I felt sitting next to her more than eight years back, or a more mellowed down sweet ardor combined with my usual clumsiness around her, or a forced repulsion due to a feigned abstinence.
Therein lay the upheaval inside ourselves always clad with a silk sheath of unasked questions which we ask ourselves rather than each other creating our own conspiracy theories on the slightest drop of a hat. Vehemently poised are the moments that still trespass on the shoulders of a lost Rendezvous in the slickest of situations and times. Our timings still remain top notch, high pitched drills of a faulty rhapsody, clinically doctored surrogacy of a child neither of us can claim. Equally clandestine are our actions following the suit of our thoughts, in my dreams or her eyes, in my audacity or her trepidation, her fidgeting or my inconspicuous raised heart beats.
Like a sinusoidal pulse we move up and down, down and up, to and fro, in arms or in thoughts, full swing, over to moon in a flash, dancing from one planet to the other, witnessing all in one go, mach 1 2 3, lightening quick, and suddenly we start falling apart at twice the terminal velocity of a mass less being filtering through dozens of layers, with our body parts taking off one by one, flip flop, bang bang.
And that’s the eternal fall I have been experiencing over the past few years. But somewhere down the line I started believing that it wasn’t a fall but my usual being which has taken the shape of a fall. Just like this memoir which I started a few days back and which is hard to let go, like nostalgia or my most recent disappointing intimacy.
