"I don’t know them any more!"

The reality sieves through my pensive mesh of loneliness. For sometime it would roam on my mindscape, looking up and putting its hands together for an ugly clap to pull my feet downwards. Carpe Diem! It evokes embarrassment in me, a kind of abashment which scolds the lack of self-abnegation. To drink a day to the lees without leaving a dreg would sounds like moments circumscribed within one’s own vicinity of interests and nothing else. And where are the other “ME-s”? Wonderful are the people who can do it. People who are selfless even to a small extend, to sacrifice their interests, to outflow, to be for others, to live for them, to be unconcerned what one to oneself is. To feel salvation by others’ smiling faces. It’s simply noble!  

Predictability! There is secureness in it. Calmness and certainty. For me it was always wearisome. People unpredictable propels a kind of excitement. I long for them. A wilderness that can give you space for guessing and re-guessing only to be fooled and surprised. “Family…” is so tender, their eyes make you haste away your rotten longings, like a bird combing back its ruffled feathers. It’s the only place for which I can leave the “carpe diem” to starve and wilt. There are laughs, hugs and affections bestowed in plenty from all sides. Love and regards mellifluously sung. But somewhere it’s so "Puritan". There is suffocation brimming, “throbbing waiting”, “I shall be rush out as I am” (Never thought that I would fall in love with Eliot’s Waste Land. Tiresias came with me at several reads. But then Love is unpredictable isn’t it?) Close those windows or my soul may fly out!  

Loneliness- it rustles behind the curtain waiting to be pulled back its silken fabric, to be viewed and acknowledged. Loneliness- Sssshhh…hold your tongue and sit still- I know you long to be stroked, cared, nursed and respected. You grow despicable because you’re always orphaned at the beginning of your existence. I would come to you when sleep buries all. Come along. Together we can interpret the ambiguities of silence- Silence which builds frontiers before us- silence chopped off and detached from us- silence embraced and melted with in us- silence immaculately pleasing. Come along. We shall rush out as we are. I long for my feet to be steeped in wet sand, waves to swish over my skin, trailing back with its white froth. The blackened moon is shifting its place in the blue infinity. We can tilt our heads and see the stars emerged and sprinkled in shapes awaiting to be sort out. I have got my tears- evapourating the bleeding soul. Hold my hand; we can build castles in this shore, only to be tampered by some sporting wind. Do you hear those words thundering? "As flies to the wanton boys are we to the Gods, they kill us for their sport!" What’s our little love in this galaxy? You cannot pluck the stars and collect it on your basket, can you? Still hope rejuvenates the desires. Do you see those worms emptying their belly to get fed on us? Let’s gaze at each other and have a straight smile, to be sanctified before they shame us on our graves!

Words once written seem to loosen their feel from the heart, packing up their aroma and taste, they look back with a blunt stare and leave me without waving goodbyes. They go away as quietly as a scribbled paper drifting towards someone’s doorstep, like a fading whistle in an empty street……..And then…"I don’t know them any more!”

And why do we meet such people?

Sometimes I feel that my life is just a flash back, that I am out there in that future with these memories twirling me back to this space, that I have already known you! Do you remember that cold night? We were sitting outside, my toes pressed in the soft grass, fingers twitching against its coldness; rifting water drops in between the green blades. I was narrating Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona. You said you adored that man with that thick black frame, his raw talent and egotism. You said you have fascination for someone “different”, just because they are “different”. Our families’ subdued noise of laughter, loosened conversations and undulating arguments after the hangover of a typical friendly dinner oozing out from the house just felt like an uninteresting movie playing in the background. We didn’t see the stars. We didn’t see the moon. The breeze was not emotional enough to move the leaves. You told me to narrate the story in every detail, that you love detailing so much. You said I am a good story teller. I said you are a good listener. We complimented each other. So special to each other. Vivacious smiles, laughter, wonder, never pausing for what to say next, never disrupted by silence. Words slipping, stretching themselves, and slithering out of our mouths, it rolled and sparked and ablazed the air around us. It’s as if I have watched that movie in a lonely feverish afternoon, lying in my couch only to narrate it to you. I shook your hand and doubted if you were something illusionary. You said how you enjoy non-entities and abstractions. I said how I long to concretize those abstractions. You said you won’t usually put the lights on until the sun completely sinks into the ocean because you want the last of the rays to be fallen on your floor. You said you loved gloomy tree tops with their distant fragile looking branches and dreamt of painting one with a naked woman lying on it, with her flowing frizzy hair tightly entangled with the top boughs. There will be tinctures of orange, grey and blue, colors spilled and smeared in profusion in the sky, with some whiteness of the paper eying out. You talked about your crush with Vermeer and his interior lightning and Girl with the Pearl Earring. It was all too much for me to take in together. I told you to gulp down your words since it’s snatching away all that I want to say.

Why do we meet such people? Like two similar fishes colliding in an upsurging wave, being grabbed by an unknown hand, to be out in the air, amused, wriggled, only to dive backward to swim their own ways.  

I used to draw only blood dripping bird wings, broken glass pieces and barren trees when I was small. What did you draw when you were small? Did you have too much colours, vibrant and variegated? Do you have some bright shades with you so that I can mix it with my dark ones? Do you have silence? Do you have sorrow? My sorrow left my body, to make me “drab and destitute” and lurks somewhere in the dark, just to be back when you leave me. My silence lost its path, dejected, crestfallen and weeping; it’s no longer “a silence”.  I didn’t want to play hide and seek because the moments you are in hiding would be the longest ones to me. I didn’t want to seek because I would hurt something by my “intentional indifference” to the things hidden by intentions. My heart would get lacerated. I have to pretend that it’s not my heart at all. And it’s hard to pretend that something is not mine when it’s undeniably and pathetically mine, mine and only mine!

There is an idea of Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gave, and you can shake my hand and feel the flesh gripping yours and may be even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable…I simply am not there.