the importance of being…

Previously.

Friday, 22nd January 11:48PM.

She shuts the door behind me. Her perfume lingers in the air, and I close my eyes and breathe deep. I can still taste her lips, I can still feel the electric tingle of her lips on mine. It’s dizzying. I am a feather floating gently on a breeze, carried higher and higher on the wings of something I cannot touch, but so real. Unbelievably real.

I am bliss incarnate.

And I am sad. Lonely and far far away from home. Floating, further and further away from something I once knew, but cannot describe, towards something I do not know.

I am the embodiment of sadness.

I walk slowly into the night. It’s warm, and there’s a bright moon in the sky, washing everything in a soft glow. The road is deserted on either end. I contemplate taking the shorter, relatively safer route which will yield a boda-boda in two minutes, or taking the longer, riskier fifteen-minutes-of-darkness route.

Foolishness wins. I need to think anyway.

See, I love darkness, and quiet and alone-ness.

Solitude has always been my friend. The deep gentle embrace of unhindered thought, the moments when the mind crumbles in clarity and exalts in obscurity. Those moments comfort me. They are without judgment, without reproach, without bias or external influence. Only acceptance that who you are is, very simply, who you are meant to be, and that the journey you find yourself on is only a result of your actions.

Actions which, in a moment of blinding lucidity,  you realize are the result of choices, which in turn, are mere illusions that kismet places in your waking dreams to keep you trudging along the path of life.

Clarity. Obscured by ridiculousness. And inevitability.

A nihilist’s wet-dream.

We spend so much time wallowing in the pits of self-pity trying to figure out what the purpose of our life is, forgetting that many, if not all, things are beyond our control, and that we should focus on the here. And the now.

And yet, I find myself wallowing away, consciously bracing myself for what is to come.

The weariness hits me like a semi-ton and I crumble onto the nearest kerb, right in-front of someone’s gate. A dog barks inside, furious at my invasion. I smile weakly.

It’s an irony no one will ever know.

11:55 AM

The phone beeps, startling me and drawing me out of my reverie.

“I miss you already”, it says, glowing green in the pale moonlight. I smile, and quickly type back, “me too”.

So why does it hurt so bad?

11:50 AM

A drop of water hits the phone screen, and for the second time, my thoughts are  interrupted. I look up, smiling. It must be about to rain. I love walking in the rain…

Weird. The sky is clear. Strange…

I look back down at the phone, and  feel the second tear running down my face.

Oh God no… I know this place. I have been here before, and… and I hate this place.

In this place, in this here and now, my hopes and my fears are one.

***

12:47 AM

The music is very loud, beautifully loud.

I sit at the counter, quiet, silent, alone. Watching my friends clumsily get their “game” on.

I love watching this charade; the ladies pretending hard that they’re not interested in the guys hitting on them, and the guys, in turn, pretending very hard to be more interesting than they’ll actually be when the ladies finally realize that their very denial is futile, and that in their minds, every guy is a jerk, anyway, except for the guy who turns out to be even more interesting than he is when he’s hitting on them, and by the time they both realise that, it is too late, and they are doomed to a life of boredom, blissful surprise or hate, and then, at that very moment, it dawns on them that life is an adventure and their what-the-heck moment turns into a smile, an exchange of numbers and a stolen kiss at the heights of intoxication.

Illusions of choice.

Her face flashes in my mind for an instant, her radiant beauty… and I remember a line from a movie that was as ridiculous in its absurd brilliance as it was amazing;

” Though I do not pretend to any great oratorical skills, I would be happy to present, with your ladies’ permission, verse from the unquiet mind of Mr. Edgar Allan Poe: Ladies, thy beauty is to me like those Nicean barks of yore, that gently, o’er a perfumed sea, the weary, wayworn wanderer bore, to his own native shore. On desperate seas long wont to roam, thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, thy Naiad airs have brought me home…” - Goldthwait Higginson Dorr, Ph.D – The Lady Killers.

And I smile again, because I am sad.

And then I remember, I came here for the noise. And as my mind dulls, as the crowd slowly swallows me, and the music drags me into its harsh pulsating bossom, I pull out my phone, her message still on the screen, and I type…

***

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