Little Mermaid Diary Entry

Late Night Time

8th November, 1992

Dear Diary,

I really wish I had a brother or sister. It gets very lonely being alone all the time.

It would also be easy to be special then because I would be older.

But what if my brother or sister were special-er?

That would make me invisible and not in a fun way like a fairy or something.

And then I would never ever be alone.

I think I will think about it.

Maria

The Phoenix and the Unicorn

“The only unbearable thing is that nothing is unbearable” – Arthur Rimbaud

I suppose I am finally beginning to realise why intelligent people often fumble back upon the expression ‘never say never’. As opposed to initial appearances the 'never' doesn’t betray false bravado rather it provides an air-tight exclusion clause for the perpetually misguided. Not taking a stand (whether good or bad) allows us the ability to recant, change, deny and even fabricate where we are and what we feel. I suppose my previous post precludes me such luxuries but then again, I figure Beentherella is inherently born of contradiction and that remains the one fail safe I can always employ. Maria Amir simply figures that seeing as this is her blog, specifically constructed to nurture her phobias and delusions, she is at liberty to throw as many tantrums as she likes and take it all back whenever she wants to.
I, quite simply, miss being able to write the truth because I find I am no good at all at speaking it and doing neither is suffocating all three of us.

I have been back in Lahore for over a month now and I am quite terrified to report that not all that much has changed. Neither the city nor Maria have truly evolved and I suppose this was to be expected given the persnickety natures of both. However that isn’t to say that there aren’t tangible shifts. Maria is spending her time conscientiously avoiding both her family and her swamp-full of memories and is forging ahead trying to be simultaneously practical and optimistic. She is working towards taking her GRE so that she can apply for PhD scholarships, leave and avoid being ‘matched’. Lahore is somehow lonely this time around. It seems to be scared of itself and for some reason Maria can no longer tap into that innate sense of ‘belonging’ when she drives on the mall on lazy afternoons listening to ‘Mera Piya Ghar Aaya’ in her dinkie.
Beentherella is quite adamant that the two factions: ‘practicality’ and ‘optimism’ are mutually exclusive to begin with. She believes that Maria is adamantly avoiding all songs, films or literature that can exacerbate her malen-coma simply because she is missing N more than she cares to admit. Beentherella insists that Miller’s formula of the ‘best way of getting over a woman/man is to turn them into literature’ is the only solution to their mutual predicament. I, ever the faithful trapeze artist, am simply trying to manage both parallels as equally and faithfully as I can. And yet, while I know that I can hold in a great deal and that I have no problems being a social pariah, I realise that I value beentherella much more now. I feel that as much as we have tried to obliterate her in practice, she tends to crop up in job interviews where Maria will refuse a perfectly wonderful opportunity on the basis of some perverse standard of idealism that I feel they both still need to uphold. Luckily, neither of us have any qualms about employing Beentherella’s regular assistance to circumvent rishta’s on that same principle.

Being back in Pakistan is proving to be rather surreal, perhaps because it is alarmingly easy to ignore everything that surrounds us once again. We are driving around the city these days simply to avoid being in company for very long and I am spending the rest of my minutes reading Pyrrho and ‘actively procrastinating’. The latter contradiction referring to the fact that I am consciously choosing to ponder for hours on end about general nothings I feel we ‘ought’ to write about but have somehow lost the courage to. I am seriously considering writing letters to strangers as I used to when I was younger, it was certainly a less volatile method of communicating with people without actually ‘communicating’ with them. Perhaps I shall search for an address, somewhere that sounds lost…like Bavaria.

Maria is writing up lists these days, scores and scores of lists: shopping lists, goal lists, life-lesson lists (sic), grocery lists and lists of things she wants to try learning. She has started a diet-plan recommended by a nutritionist that diverts much of her attention towards missing things like coke, cheese and Abbot Road ke channay which help her to avoid missing other ‘things’. Beentherella is spending her hours perfecting her caricature of an imaginary friend that can fill in for the tangible best friend she has not yet managed to locate and I spend my time marvelling at how one person can manage to avoid them self in so many mirrors.

We have always been fascinated by two mythical contradictions: the Phoenix and the Unicorn. I find that at present both creatures manage to capture Maria and her doppelganger quite effectively. Maria is currently steamrolling her way into the appearance of maturity and some odd notion of ‘re-invention’ that she feels may vindicate the mess she has made of herself. She is labouring under the apprehension that she can fundamentally re-align who she is if she acts the part of the cold, practical, adult who -after having been burnt and reduced to ashes- can emerge triumphant. The odd thing about the mythology of the phoenix is that after its thousandth year no matter how productive the life of the bird, it is destined only to live as long and as 'like' its old self. This tends to negate all ‘reincarnation’ paradigms where redemption is ultimately offered up as a cosmic bribe for correcting one’s flaws, failings and the breaking of patterns. The only guarantee the phoenix myth proffers is the perennial presence of a pattern.
Beentherella on the other hand is flexing her elusive might to see how far she can push us all into obscurity. She has always considered loneliness to be a pinnacle and now seems to be settling in with the concept much more completely than she ever did in the past. She knows that we will not find him again. We, none of us, will manage another beautiful nightmare that is simultaneously true and terrifying enough to keep us morbidly intrigued; challenge our flailing convictions and allow us to jump again. I cannot honestly define whether the unicorn encapsulates beentherella or the elusive friend that she survives to seek. Marianna Mayer in ‘The Unicorn and the Lake’ describes the creature as “the only fabulous beast that does not seem to have been conceived out of human fears. In even the earliest references he is fierce yet good, selfless yet solitary, but always mysteriously beautiful. He can be captured only by unfair means…”

All I really know is that I have managed to get both of them in the same room, huddled in the same corner, sat on the same bench and writing on the same page. Of course, it is all artifice at preset: a cross between Dali’s assertion of false memories and true ones being akin to jewels. The false ones always appear the most real. And yet, it is better than the gaping 'nothing' that preceded it.
So for now I shall be content with the busy business of making something out of all of us.

The End

“The palace of crystal may be an idle dream, it may be that it is inconsistent with the laws of nature and that I have invented it only through my own stupidity, through the old fashioned habit of my generation. But what does it matter to me that it is inconsistent? That makes no difference since it exists in my desires, or rather exists as long as my desires exist.”
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

And so I have reached my pinnacle, only to discover that it was always destined to be my demise. I have spent my two months of purgatory in New York and am now back in the glorious, languid heat of Lahore. I have also realised the futility of any attempt at trying to be myself; of actively coveting this sad repository of imagination. Many would say ‘I have been found out’ and mayhaps I have. Beentherella has been discovered, brutally raped, publicly ridiculed and put to shame by the vilest of all foes. I am told that my thoughts are offensive and hurtful to those around me and that I must apologise for them to no end. I have done that too…and yet, I cannot help but think them. The thought still persists, it still plagues. I can - in no sincere measure - summon up genuine guilt for this one exercise that has offered me solace over the past five years: writing for an audience. Much like Plath's journal, my blog- this trite, cream corner in cyberspace has been my ‘Sargasso’: my litany of dreams, directives, imperatives and ideal-isms.

Still, my experiences in the past month have taught me the weight and value of a poker face; of the silent spirit and of the repressed thought. Perhaps it was an inexcusable vanity on my part to assume that my feelings and my truths could remain my own. That my idle stream of perpetual procrastination could continue un-interrupted and that my casual corner would be frequented only by complete strangers. It has been the most asinine attempt at self-regression, this perpetual monologue of barely-contained melodrama that I had longed to continue clear of consequences. It was all bound to collapse and so it has.
Beentherella has left the building. And I shall turn once again to scribbling in waiting blank pages and to my type writer that has never betrayed me with delicious illusions of an admiring audience. This, whatever this compulsion is or has been: to be known, read, understood and perhaps even identified with is a whimsical, pathetic exercise at its very core.
It is pure, primitive need.

I am told (now that I have navigated my own personal minefield of damage control) that no one really has the ‘right’ to tell a truth that is lucid enough to illicit a reaction from another being, any reaction. I feel far too much like a mutilated, dilapidated Howard Roark, for I too ‘have no sense of people’. And I have not yet had the luxury of stumbling upon any treasure trove of ‘harmless, simple, benign’ personal truths that I can convey without fear. I must admit in turn, that I cannot even crave such hollows. In this particular instance I cannot help but agree with Rand, and I refuse to accept 'anything except what seems to be the easiest for people: the halfway, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.' Because Beentherella, despite all her pretty-isms was bold beyond measure in this one capacity: she never lied. I have finally felt the full brunt of ‘Them’ and ‘Their’ ability to cripple even the smallest of self reflections with a finality that both she and I are unable to disregard. So I shall bow out with the last shreds of my dignity precariously intact to once again traverse the pinnacle that is Loneliness.

My lesson remains to return to my former silence. It shouldn’t be too difficult to revisit a state of perpetual placidity, for I was quite adept at it not too long ago. A lesson, I now feel quite foolish for having ignored for so long, in some naïve attempt to tell my truth and finally discover myself. I have wallowed shamelessly in the delusion that harsh lessons gleaned from the past can be discarded in better times for humorous ones. It is always, always, always safer to remain locked. No one has ever paid a price for keeping silent...at least not in public.

So I shall leave you now - friends, foes, strangers, acquaintances and fellow Hobo's to move on to the bitter business of ‘Being’.

Beentherella was the figment.

Maria Amir is the fact.

Solitaire

“The best is the deep quiet in which I live and grow against the world, and harvest what they cannot take from me by fire or sword” – Goethe

I have taken up an old habit once more and it is oddly refreshing to discover that I can re-visit past trivialities with such ease. I am playing solitaire again and remembering how much I used to enjoy not needing to surf the web, type up resume’s or worry about checking my mail box for emails that never arrive. It is a relief to re-discover the simple pleasure of still finding myself capable of whiling away the hours mind-numbingly playing solitaire. My aunt recently noticed my new past time and commented on it.

“It’s the word I can’t stand ‘Soliatire’,” she said with a shudder. And I shall always treasure this fundamental difference between us…on her behalf, for it gives me hope that one of us seeks glorious hope over the oddly bitter, blandness of truth. You see, it is only love of the word that makes me love the game.
“Yes, but that’s just because the name represents a morbid sort of truth,” I said.
“Absolutely not! That isn’t truth. No one is all alone,” she added vehemently.

I became silent at that, which is my usual response to any conviction that I hold but simultaneously realize I cannot convince (nor do I want to) another of. I am incapable of arguing about ‘the big things’ because I recognize that our views on all the big unanswerable’s stem from individual experience and yet I can carry a conversation about them with relative ease. Perhaps it is an irrational fear I harbor of accidentally proselytizing. I loathe the pulpit tradition of preaching answers to unanswerable questions. I do not think I could stomach that in myself.

Yet, I long for such conviction and I am envious that I cannot find it or even want it. After all, if we human beings are the sum of all that has happened to us; the people we have encountered and the way we are wired to perceive those dualities, then by definition ‘conviction’ cannot be taught or passed on or somehow triggered. Whether or not one appreciates the word ‘Solitaire’ for what it means, is in a similar vein to whether or not one can inherently view and measure the world in a proverbial glass of water that is either ‘half full’ or ‘half empty’. Sponsors of the latter metaphor will never really admit or embrace their position because it ‘sounds’ wrong, even if it is true as the case may be. I, for one, know with reasonable certainty that the only limited freedoms I have ever known, I have found in loneliness. It is a twisted impasse to navigate: Solitaire. Because the word rests, not on belief or perception but rather on …countenance. It is that lingering query that rests on the fringe of all things. One can rationalize it away but one cannot revolutionize it.

Does one believe that life is spent alone, surrounded by people who can never know the ‘you’ that lurks in the corner of your skin; your address; your bank account; your diploma’s and your photographs?

Or

Does one believe that we all tend to think we are special and that is precisely what connects us into an intricately woven tapestry of souls, spaces and the side-effects of solipsism? If everyone is special then by extension no one can be special.

Those that tend to believe the former (whether or not they admit to it) fall largely into that odd fixture of never knowing how to live in this world without being of this world. They tend to be quite comfortable living outside the world. It is ‘the world’ that is uncomfortable with their existence, with their innate ability to function outside of the social and sociable premise. Minorities of all varieties always offend majorities because they provide a constant reminder of how the latter has not yet completely ‘won’. How any majority will always just be that, a majority, persistently at the precipice of becoming a monolith but never quite managing it. They know, they recognize invariably that they are always alone and that ‘people’ must always be kept at bay lest the tide of their emotions, their needs, their wants and their …issues swallow the individual. That the frail spark of self, having sprung up in spite of all that surrounds it shall be squelched. And so they defend it ferociously in their fortress. They are that misshapen, congealed puzzle piece that is left behind once the picture is made and complete. They are unnecessary and yet that is their only claim for clemency… that they do not aspire to be more than what they ‘are’. Embracing the word ‘solitaire’ means knowing that you are enough for ‘you’ to survive and also knowing that this admission somehow bars you from the world outside and those that live and flourish in it. To flourish in the world requires the pretence of mimicry, of marginalization, of momentary, monetary couplings that mean nothing.

The other creed that learns to detest the word ‘solitaire’ tends to prosper, simply because they are able to seek solace in society. They can love and also be loved (in my experience, it is the latter that is trial some). They have learned to walk among the sea of faces and not trip in the tide, to dust themselves off and move in unison with the battalion. They march for progress, for the constant illusion of movement and money. They learn to survive and to do it well. They travel through time in the perpendicular, tangent North and they grow old in so many mirrors bearing the same reflection.

I presently traverse in terrifying limbo, knowing that much as I would love to delay all decisions, life is all about knowing your take on that infernal glass; on this confounded word; on those blasted rose-tinted glasses. Life cannot be carved or commissioned from within this in-between layer of time and perception that rests uncomfortably wedged beneath the real, above the unreal and beyond the surreal. This place reminds me of the 24th century story of Chuang Tzu, who dreamed of a butterfly and was unable to decide if he was the man who had dreamt of being a butterfly or a butterfly who now dreamt of being a man. Was it the dream that lived him or the other way around? And yet for both of them, the dreamer and the dreamed one, the conflict lies not in awakening but rather of choosing how to keep dreaming.

The need to choose this premise, and quickly, stems primarily from the fact that I have decided to go back to Pakistan in October and work again, while applying for my PhD. It also rests in the undeniable ‘solitaire’ truth of having turned twenty-six this year and realizing what this means back home. It means that re-joining my grandparents will mean being unceremoniously thrust back into the Lahore marriage-market as ‘soon-to-be-going-bust stock’. Sadly, it does not do (in Pakistan) to insinuate that one may just not be suited for constant companionship, much as there may be times when one craves it. To be honest, I am not even sure whether I am arguing for or against marriage most of the time. I am perfectly clear, however, on the fact that the institution terrifies me either way. If I am lucky enough to be happily wed, housed and family-ed then I must re-discover who I am (a tedious re-evaluation) or where I shall pocket Beentherella and her whimsical, beautiful nightmares. If I am not and grow old and alone then I will have to live with Beentherella forever and that is an equally petrifying proposition. I am told this particular catch-22 is really supposed to hit home at 30. Apparently, I have four more years to self-combust.

“You’re a girl. Girls get married,” my grandmother tells me flatly.

I know better than to argue with a seventy-seven year old woman who has raised five ‘girls’.

Diary of Discontent

"New York is something awful, something monstrous. I like to walk the streets, lost, but I recognize that New York is the world's greatest lie. New York is Senegal with machines”– Frederico Garcia Lorca

And so I have discovered Lorca. I am deriving immense comfort from my newly obtained copy of ‘Gypsy Ballads’ most of which I spent an entire day reading at Barnes and Nobles today. It is reassuring to read a fellow malcontent at his prime and I long for the ability to complain and whine about the inevitability of the machine with similar grace. Still one must do what one can and my not-so eloquent ravings must suffice. I have failed and am failing miserably at summoning faux enthusiasm for America, for the future and most definitely for my ‘prospects’. My family finds me astonishingly ungrateful, seeing as I am not frothing at the mouth at the sheer serendipity of mayhaps becoming that next immigrant, sporting her hard bargained H1 to strut the streets of Manhatten.
My usual exaggerated enthusiasm is noticeably absent and even I cannot fully fathom why.

While I realize that I have never had much in lieu of ambition, I do not think that is what bothers me the most about being in this city or in contemplating staying here. It may have something to do with how big everything is here. I have always harbored an unnatural fear, aversion and apprehension towards big things and America is all about big every-things. Still the practical side (of my family, certainly none to be had in myself) reiterates that all opportunities lead here and I would be a fool (sic) to ‘pass this up’. It may very well be that all universal history rests on a handful of clichés and that we are all measured by how well we live up to one particular cliché in question: success. I am reading far too many fragments these days to make sense of how I feel or think. Though I am not making much progress with the latter I am profoundly grateful for the constant pleasure and isolation that books still bring.

I have been trying to muddle through Novalis’s ‘Logological Fragments’ these past two weeks and I desperately wish I had been a philosophy student, if only so that I could pretend to understand him. I ‘feel’ though, that his words are like chimeras and while I am struggling to understand their meaning their nuance is overwhelming. Novalis speaks of the greatest magician being one who would cast over himself a spell so complete that he would take his own phantasmagorias as autonomous appearances. I can imagine this all too clearly…alarmingly so. And I wonder if this is where I stand now, post-heartbreak, wallowing and whining incessantly with nothing to console me save this one delusion. This delusion that I am the undivided divinity operating within me. That I have conceived and dreamt and already written my world. That this world is ubiquitous in space and sustainable in time. The tragedy lies in the fact that it is nearly impossible to play by the rules of another world that one does not care to admit exists, that one does not aspire to be part of and that one abjectly loathes in most of its manifestations!

Mostly I am wallowing and I am getting better at it by the day. Currently the only silver lining canvasing my horizons is the imminent arrival of an old friend to New York in September. A fellow deviant, who embraces his madness more fully and fruitfully than I could ever hope to. I like to think of ‘Paagal Insaan’ in Dalinian terms. Dali said “There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad” but my friend wears his label unabashedly and by his creed ‘Mad’ is the new ‘Sane’. I look forward to mocking this metropolis in his company since I am currently shunning all company.

But it is still his voice that drives most of my discontent and his presence that still lingers on in all my out-moded, silly fantasies of 'could have beens'. Heart break is truly a terrible thing...and not for the reasons usually reiterated by romantics of every creed...rather for hope. It is knowing that whatever is to come now will never compare, that new people will never be 'new' enough and that love will now, finally have to be relegated to 'romance'. That pretty pretence, diamonds and pleasantries shall prevail. That the truth has lost and the lie has triumphed.
“You know what I find surprising about this?”
“You find things surprising?” I had perfected my own whimsical flavour of trite by then.
“I really don’t feel the need to lie to you, its rather…refreshing. I mean, I realize it might not be that way for you, but…”
“No, it isn’t. We, of the feminine vein, tend to base our happiness and Ever After’s on lovely lies. But ironically enough I am relieved to be rid of them.”
“Don’t you think that’s a bit premature?”
“It may be, but I already know there are no ‘Ever After’s’ here, so I don’t miss or crave the lying. I never really trust the lies when they sound pleasant anyway,” so I babbled my way through the swamps of that conversation.
“That’s probably why you are quite adept at this.”
“At what, precisely?” it was going to sting, I could practically taste it.

“Bitter truths…absolute honesty, even,” he sounded almost proud of me and that stung.

If he only knew.

I now find myself caught in the mirage of a morbid arcana that I don’t wish to lose. I wade through my days hearing his voice and feeling his presence mock me at every turn. He would hate me now as I manufacture a 'me' that none of my selves are. I am faking fake-ness, it appears, and this is an all time low. ‘They’ ask me to be practical, plastic and perfunctory and I pretend. ‘They’ ask me to write white-noise and I pretend. ‘They’ ask me to laugh at trite jokes, cake my face and pout my lips, take pleasure in shopping sprees and smile at cameras and I pretend. ‘They’ tell me that literature is nothing more than verbal algebra and that I need to crunch those alphabets in inane, simple, cliché’s because that is what ‘audiences want’ and I pretend.My solitary verse in the Vedanta has finally splintered and I am ‘corrected’.I am also bitter, melodramatic, prissy and self-righteous.

But I pretend my way around it.

Woodcutter,
Cut my shadow from me.
Free me from the torment
Of seeming myself fruitless.

New 'You's' in New York

It is unbecoming to infer that the killers are weak and the victims will win, it complicates the nightmare with the dream.
Put away your courage it is a provocation in their sight.

I am unable to recall clearly how many times I have now found myself perched at the precipice of a proverbial ‘new beginning’. Truth be told, I am quite weary of ‘new beginnings’, they act as the perpetual ping-pong punctuation on the run-on sentence that is my life. Individual conformity is my prescribed pattern of existence: how is one to dare anticipate a positive outcome born of such convoluted contradiction? When I was eight and being sent off to live with my father it was a new beginning; when there was pain and only the bleak, looming stretch of more pain to come it was ‘This too shall pass’; when, ten years later, I managed to escape that saturated swamp of venom, it was a new beginning; when I started learning voluntarily that was a new beginning; when I got accepted to Oxford that was a ‘new beginning’ and now as I leave to look for myself in the capital of universal self seekers the term is being thrown around all over again. There is nothing new about these beginnings, they are all far too old to begin anew and I recall that saying about a fool being someone who continues doing the same thing again and again expecting a different result each time.
Yet, it remains what we fools are destined to do I suppose and so ‘that which we are, we are’.

I recognise that my more than morbid meanderings are laced with melodrama, self pity and a rather unhealthy dose of narcissism. Still, this year and this particular ‘beginning’ has brought with it far too much ‘reality’, nearly enough to completely obliterate Beentherella. It is hard now to summon up my usual enthusiasm for …anything. I have spent the past weeks packing, roaming the streets of Oxford, silently sketching, watching movies and trying to immerse myself in my ‘aloneness’ with the same vehement determination I always reserved for it. However, this is mayhaps what I resent the most about free falling, heart-long in overtly-unrequited love. The fact that it has cemented that painful realisation that ‘No, I don’t love being alone’ no matter how good I am at it.
And I am very good at it.

Another recent development has been my inability to continue expressing myself on this particular forum. The entire point of having a ‘me space’ on the web was to not know who knew the ‘me’ in question. I have always relished this rare opportunity to actually be as brutally honest, insane and explicit as I can sans repercussions. Collecting my personal collage of cyber strangers, face-less friends and brash critics I have managed here and really nowhere else, to completely be all of my many ‘me’s’ at some time or another. Recently I have become aware of some of my readers and the axis has shifted completely. It is an odd sort of reversal being confronted with my virtual reality, by real people talking to the corporal, artificial I. There are just too many ‘me’s’ in such conversations and we are all airbrushed. I have grown up, I suppose, in the sense that I have learned to numb my mind and yet I have not lived. I have swallowed far too much and tasted nothing. The sad part is that I have recognised that this isn’t or wasn’t ever about where I was or am…it has always been about who I am. I choose not to participate in the perverse façade of being part of a ‘people’, any people. I have realised that I am quite a coward.

Recently, I was hit by one of my more severe waves of manic, suicidal depression. This time I navigated the mechanics of an End for fourteen hours on a not-so-random Tuesday spent staring at a half-full bottle of nail polish remover, contemplating how immediate its effects would be. I calmly composed one of my more eloquent- and I feel, sufficiently melodramatic- ‘last words’ and pondered how the world would go on without me and how it wouldn’t. There is a meticulous process to all suicide attempts. The vast majority are located amidst extreme bursts of adrenaline spiralling out of control into demonic descent and I have had my share of those in the past. In fact that is how ‘Beentherella’ came into being. She took birth from the ashes of my fourteen-year-old self vowing to never go down this path ever again. She was determined to remain forever vigilant on my behalf. She deemed it a terrible cowardice. Today, she knows better.

Cowardice is a failure to accept the reality and rationality of such a decision. Cowardice is want and hope for change when one knows not to expect it. Cowardice is the triumph of religion over reason; of matter over mind; of memory over meaning and above all of Elpis. Cowardice is the sound of her dancing in the rain and smiling at the stars. In general I accept reality with a fluid sort of ease, because I intuit that nothing is real. The fact that I believe foremost in ‘doubt’; in the certainty of nothing indicates to my warped self that I also believe in anything…because it doesn’t matter either way. I read once that the ancient cabalists used to pretend that man was a microcosm of sorts, a symbolic mirror of the universe. I do not know if I am narcissistic enough to believe that and yet I recognise that it is only narcissistic if one assumes the ‘universe’ to be grand. That is further complicated if one assumes that anything ‘grand’ is inherently ‘good’. In the end it all only remains unexplained. My cowardice stems not so much from fear of the unknown but rather that worn-out, perennial Pascal’s Wager: ‘Mayhaps tomorrow’.

And so I succumbed. I found myself calling my aunt with a rather pathetic S.O.S to convince me to choose my cowardice; to give me reasons to stay; to tell me it will ‘all be all right’. All so I could scoff at her in my mind while simultaneously indulging my emotional insolvency in the assertion that there are those who would care if I am dead. Whereas if anything, I shouldn’t! Sadly, that too did pass. And now the Future looms once again, hope springs bitterly triumphant as Time brings with it a tidal wave of the trivial: Harry Potter films to see, restaurants to try, graduation to look forward to, a PhD to shoot for, careers, New York big-end-ings, novels to write, thoughts to think, countries to see, hazy, misty first impressions of a tiny person I can love enough to not need to love myself and You. You: whoever You are or were or could have been or will be that I have never casually bumped into lurking behind a bookshelf; crossing the street, across a car park or sitting next to on a plane.

And to think, I lament 26 years of being the mess that is me today!

Bhrāntapratāvakāvakya

‘The Deluded Deceiver’: He who speaks the truth while thinking to lie.

I find myself cautiously navigating that most curious parallel: that one where you find yourself unsure about how to continue simply… ‘being’. I am presently plagued with an unending series of belligerent aphorisms and I can’t take comfort in any of them. Is life the composite of all that we have lost or all that we have found? Or worse yet… all that we are seeking?

I would very much like to locate that luscious lake called ‘Self Pity’ and drown in it so completely that there is no hope of ever resurfacing. Instead I find myself getting ready to attend one of Oxford’s infamous ‘bops’ because I am told one ‘ought’ to celebrate completing their degree. And I recognise that I ought to feel like celebrating, so I shall pretend that I feel like celebrating. I have heard that this is how most people begin to ‘believe’ things. Hell, it was how I used to believe things! Still, on that lake called ‘Self Pity’ there is a sordid little 'Bridge of Details' and it alludes to all that rubbish about ‘moving on, dusting off, getting over it’.

And so… 'Here's to bridging the Bridge'.

Needless to say ‘bridging’ some gaps is harder than others. In case I had neglected to mention it before, I am inherently incapable of enjoying myself at parties. I am incapable of getting ‘too’ drunk; of ‘loosening up’; of ‘just having some fun’; or doing ‘something stupid’ and of ‘checking people out’. However, recently I find myself on a crusade. A crusade that involves hiding from myselves and especially ‘not thinking’…about anything. 'Thinking' leads to 'thinking about N' and I find that avoiding this precinct is the only thing effectively keeping me sane. So keeping busy doing things I loathe in order to feel ‘proactive’ and ‘sociable’ seems to be one plausible solution. Looking for another would require the fore-mentioned ‘thinking’. I have never really elaborated the merits of ‘numbness’ on this forum. I shan’t now, except to state that there are many.

I have only odd, lilting recollections left. It seems we were nothing alike, except in our mutual sophistry. We both derived a perverse pleasure in seeing how far the other could ‘not feel’ things. I suppose when the key in any romantic equation is ‘not feeling’, ‘not expressing’, ‘not admitting’ it does render the exercise somehow…evocative. I always did enjoy subtext far too much for my own good. And that is all we were in the end: a simulacra of subtext. Still, it was powerful subtext - if one belongs to the ‘lesson-learning’ creed.

“You know, I just realised something... even I haven’t done this before.”

“‘What’, precisely?” for once I felt a real answer coming on.

“Seen someone more than once, without getting her into bed,” he said this with a soft smirk, his arm slung casually around my shoulders. A less astute person might have even called it a smile.

I was floored and not in a good way. I suppose I should have been flattered and I suppose I was a little, but mostly I was irate.

“Please stop doing this!”

“I thought you, if anything, would be pleased to know that,” he seemed genuinely surprised.

“That is the point. I don’t need you trying to make me feel ‘special’ while simultaneously putting me in my place all the time. Please make up your mind! You have conditions. I –for my own madness- have accepted them unequivocally. I thought you prided yourself on your 'honesty', so stop humouring me! It’s confusing and frankly it’s cruel.” I was beyond caring that I was acting quite the quintessential harpy. I am not sure if I looked it.

“How is it cruel?” now he was curious.

“Well, I would think that in this equation…”

“Please define what you mean by ‘this equation’, Maria,” oh yes, he was most certainly amused.

“An equation, where one feels everything for another who feels nothing,” I was rather glad to see the last of that formidable smirk.

“And so ‘me being kind, is me actually being cruel’?” he said this softly and I almost believed he understood.

“Well I tend to think of this as an ‘inverse relationship’ on all counts,” I pedal the ‘sad smile’ to an art form.

“Interesting way of putting it,” he stated blankly.

The conversation ended, for once on my terms. Of course the fact that ‘my terms’ were all about merely upholding ‘his terms’... unless he changed the terms, is largely irrelevant. If there was one thing I was clear about in this ‘falling in love’ business, it was that I would not beg. It is degrading enough to know that the object of your adoration knows how you feel, does not return those feelings and still gets to literally ‘have his way with you’... but it is quite another to drown entirely.

I admit that I did glean some satisfaction from the fact that my strident fixation about sticking to his rules wasn’t as pleasing to him as it once appeared to be. It was the one contradiction that I hadn’t anticipated: the fact that I would be fighting to keep his rules intact. That it would hurt so deeply whenever he was generous or kind or even charming because he would counter it all in the next instant. The way I figured: an emotional roller coaster was more than enough, I simply didn’t have the stamina to navigate a mental one. And to be ‘honest’, the premise of all this nonsense had been to... ‘be honest’. How dare he break his own cardinal rule and still expect a waver on my part! He mentioned his surprise at how skilled I was about affecting ‘nonchalance’.

“You act well. I mean, I realise how my behaviour must hurt you,” he was inquiring. I could tell.

“Yes it does. So?” I was genuinely calm at this point.

“Excuse me?”

“I mean, why would that concern you? Does it?” okay, so now I was inquiring.

“No. Of course it doesn’t. Still, it is quite the ‘proverbial elephant in the room’,” he said this in his usual vapid, glaze.

“Do I make it worse?” I was worried.

I really had been trying to focus all my efforts at making our conversations compelling. At learning and talking and listening. Mostly, at ‘collecting’ things: gestures, gazes, mementos of minutes spent completely at ease. Things that I could remember later on sans vitriol. I had figured I was getting good at it. Perhaps not.

“Surprisingly, no. You are rather odd that way, Maria,” he smirked.

“Yes, I am that.”

We were outside one of the lecture theatres at Balliol College, where he had asked me to join him. The talk centred on Schopenhauer’s aphorisms and essays and the lecturer focused specifically on the essays relating to women. I knew from that point onwards that the real reason he had asked me to join him was to enjoy seeing me squirm in my seat and seethe silently. Admittedly, it is rather funny in retrospect. Calling a feminist (albeit a flaky one) to sit through a two-hour talk on how women are ‘mental myopic’s’ and never should have been given the right to vote as they don’t have the cerebral capacity to process anything beyond 'house keeping', is testy. Sadly, my new found masochism only rejoiced in seeing him laugh, always (it seemed) at my expense.

“So what did you think?” he was smiling... widely, unreservedly. It was blinding.

“Quite intriguing,” I was nonplussed.

“Yes, I always find Schopenhauer quite…scintillating. I thought, you of all people would appreciate the subject matter!” he blithely led me around the quad toward his room.

“Quite,” I smiled.

I could take a joke. I could take a misogynist, imperialist, fascist joke!

And then we were in his room. I suppose I was enjoying his enjoyment far too much to even notice, until I did. I won’t say that I panicked, at least not in a bad way. I was terrified but also eager. And that is why it all fell down.

He kissed me.

I froze.

He realised before I did that all of this, all of everything I struggled with, rested in a past I was simply not willing to confront. I still wasn’t but he forced the realisation on me. And I hated him for it. All I needed to do at that moment was run and hide and…die. This one time he refused to let me do either. He brought me a coke (ah! A passing ode to constant comforts) and we lay down on the bed and talked. We spoke in whispers all night until I was spent with the force of my confession, my admission and my imminent dismissal. I had actually wanted this, for the first and only time in my life. I had wanted to be touched and held. To collapse under the weight of crippling realisations at this moment, with this man …was cruelty beyond comprehension. He didn’t say anything as I recanted a tale that I am, quite frankly, sick of spinning in retrospect. We slept and I do believe I am the only woman who has only ever ‘just slept’ in his bed, not that I was remotely grateful for it. The sound of rain waking me up in the morning was a baptism. I silently unwound myself from his arms, his presence and his pity.

Luckily there were no goodbyes, no platitudes and no long or drawn out alibis. I shall remember him, always as one of life’s antique lost causes. Much like myself, only inverted and much more opulent. We are two rather huge people: too immense in our contradictions, our cynicism and our perverted facades. All people are Fake, lounging around the precincts of so-called happiness, trying to look like the real thing. We, then, are the Real-fake stoics trying very much to appear fake because it is ‘honest’.

Still, I suppose at some point I will begin to celebrate again. I will rejoice in a Land far, far away at some twisted 'Happily Never After' tangent in the future, that at least I finally have a ‘love story’ of my own to tell. It is short and trite as most tales of this particular genre are. But it is mine.

“You see, I found The Guy.

The Guy never let me get The Guy.

And I never let me get The Guy.”

The End.

Reverse Ontology

“Icame to you with a soiled philosophy of loneliness and you begged mefor an interview”

– LeonardCohen

Ifind that I cannot keep our conversations out of my head, which iswhy I prefer to put them outside for everyone else to judge andridicule. I find I am bad at judging everything. So I have decided toarchive this warped, one-sided romance for my audience of cyberstrangers. Perhaps it will sound more compelling this way. Perhaps Ijust want some sort of testimony to look back upon when this allcollapses to see why I did it. Perhaps I enjoy the honesty of baringsomething that matters too much to me and not at all to anyone elseand is therefore best stuck up on a glittering billboard to beridiculed outside of my temporal lobe. It feels a lot likeself-regressing, as if I were playing the Blue Danube backwards,hoping to somehow reverse the power of its intoxication.

Myencounters with N bring to mind something another cyber-acquaintancehas illustrated time and again in his blog: Elpis. I have followedthis particular person's online paradoxes for quite a few years now,almost always driven by the morbid curiosity I harbour for nihilismthat is manifesting itself much more clearly now. Although he alwaysworked to keep Elpis at bay, I find that I am desperately seeking herout as she runs screaming in the opposite direction. In the past Ialways read his accounts with a bitter, self-righteous defiance buttoday I have to yield to his superior insight regarding thisparticular theme. She really is a trite, cruel and fickle being.

Imade it a point not to dress up for the occasion because I knew alltoo well that he would pick up on it and comment. The only effort Idedicated to the event was to substitute my glasses for contactlenses. I entered the Ashmolean from the side entrance adjacent tothe Taylorian Library, this would allow me a chance to spot himwithout being observed. It would also give me ample time to come tomy senses if there was room left for that. He sat at the front stepsof the museum, cup of coffee in hand and looking…well, not entirelybored. He seemed to be scoping the crowd and I found thisencouraging, which I immediately realised was foolish (the pointwhere that infernal Elpis observation made its appearance inpassing). I was late. I had made it a point to be late, half in theattempt to see if he would care to wait and half hoping I wouldchicken out entirely. Apparently neither was about to happen. So Iapproached him.

Hedidn’t particularly react to seeing me there but he did flash apolite smile of greeting in my direction. The kind that means nothingbut is the indulgent courtesy that one reserves for strangers onstreet corners that accidentally catch your eye.

“You’renot wearing your glasses, was that for my benefit?”

.Sigh.

“Whydon’t you go ahead and assume it is,” I repliedsarcastically. It was my turn.

“Hmmm.So, you came. I wasn’t sure you would,” he said politely.

Iraised my eyebrows wearily and he did have the grace to manage aflustered laugh.

“Well,okay I was quite sure you would but I wasn’t entirely positive,”he indulged me.

“WellI suppose I feel all better now,” I said caustically.

“Right,so you’re thinking that being sarcastic throughout this encounterwill help you deal with …this. I suppose it is effective from yourpoint of view,” he mused, almost to himself.

Okay,so if I was going to play this …‘game’, was the only word for it(much as I loathe that term in this particular context) I suppose the only thingI had on my side was the element of surprise. I would forfeit. Icertainly wasn’t winning anything anyway if I went through withthis. Luckily, even I am not delusional enough to expect things whenit comes to emotional dependence of any variety. On that score wewere both evenly matched.

“Actually,I would rather not ‘be’ anything, if that’s possible and I amnot sure it is. However I was hoping I could try being as brutallyhonest as you,” I replied calmly, or so I hoped.

“Youwant to be a jerk too?” he asked, somewhat surprised andsimultaneously amused.

Icould honestly smile at that. “Sure, you make it look soeasy.”
There was that smirk again.

“Well,I make it look easy because for me it is,” he was giving me anout again.

“Irealise that and I promise to not let that escape my mind any timesoon,” I said quietly.

Hesounded slightly exasperated now. “So you are going to, what,Maria…pretend from now on that you don’t care about anythingeither?”

“No. I am simply going to try and behonest. Who says your nihilism hasn’t met its match in my perverseidealism,” I figured my false bravado would not be openlycontested.

Heseemed to think the same thing or so I supposed. “This shouldprove to be an interesting experiment then,” he almostsmil…no, it was still a smirk.

Weheaded out to find a place for lunch and he asked me if I had anypreferences. I decided that if I was going to be honest about this‘honesty’ thing then I should say Jamie’s. Jamie’s is arather pricey Italian restaurant owned by the BBC prize chef by thesame name. He asked me why that particular place and I told himbecause I couldn’t afford it on my own and if I was going to beberated I preferred the opposition to at least foot a considerablebill. He appeared to be impressed with my response. I was impressedwith it too. Perhaps that sounds narcissistic. I sure hope so, Idesperately needed a good dose of self-love to off-set my selfloathing and help me hold my own through this.

Over lunch we maderelevant small talk, he asked me about my taste in music and I toldhim I was a Dylan and Cohen fan. Apparently he approved, he said itexplained "a lot". I assumed this was some kind ofreference to my fore-mentioned idealism and let it pass. He onlylistened to classical music, which was easy enough to anticipate:lots of Bach, Wagner, Handel, Puccini. He asked me about my favouritebook this year and I mentioned that I had discovered Borges thisyear. He had no criticism on that score.

“So,really, why did you come today?” he asked.

“Ithink I have developed a very healthy respect for curiosity as anemotion. I think it is severely underrated how compelling curiosityreally is. Especially in a situation like this…”

“Meaning?”

“Well,on every rational, self-preserving note I shouldn’t be here. I knowI will get hurt, you have told me I will get hurt and yet here I am.So the only explanation I have left is curiosity. I am Alice as ofnow,” I said as honestly as anyone should have to under suchspeculation.

“Aptlyput, considering this is the city that gave birth to Alice,”he mused.

“Ohplease! Are you going to pull college rank on me now? You don’t goto Christ Church either,” I said indignantly.

“No,but Balliol outranks St. Anne’s any day,” he scoffed.

Ishould have stuck my tongue out at him. It would have been honest. Itook a sip of my coke instead. It seemed more dignified. It occurredto me quite suddenly that this was not as bad as I had feared until,of course, it became precisely that bad.

“So,how exactly are we going to do this?” he asked, pinning mewith a levelled gaze.

“Dowhat?” I prayed we weren’t actually going to discuss themechanics of this…whatever the hell it was!

“Well,you told me you haven’t really dated much and after what I told youlast time, I was just wondering how we were going to proceed withthis. You must have considered it or you wouldn’t be here,”he said, with what appeared to be some sympathy for my predicamentbut apparently not enough sympathy to avoid the subject entirely. Ihad neglected to mention that ‘not dated much’ meant exactlythree dates in my twenty-six year life span and two kisses. How didpeople do this?

“Ummwell, if I’m being honest…” I stammered.

“Areyou being honest?” he asked flatly.

“Youknow, I really do resent that. If anything, ‘honest’ is reallythe only thing I am being. It doesn’t come as brutally to me as itmay to you but the fact that I haven’t been put off by yourattitude should at least let me off on this score,” I supposeI said this angrily, despite all my efforts to the contrary.

“You’resaying that my brutal honesty doesn’t bother you?!” healmost laughed.

“No,of course it does…” he raised an eye brow in satisfaction. Irecall thinking that this was a truly warped thing to derivesatisfaction from.

“But,it is the brutality and the apathy that bothers me, not the honestyadmitting to them. Obviously I really do appreciate the honestyotherwise nothing would keep me here.”

He did seemto appreciate that. “My particular brand of honesty reallyisn’t the best thing for healthy relationships …I am told.”

Ihad to grin at that, “believe me, even I am not delusionalenough to classify whatever this is as in any way ‘healthy’!”

Helaughed.

Ihad made him laugh. I suppose I lost this bizarre tug –of –warright then. Women really are masochists. Suddenly I was very aware ofhow all my feminist colleagues would excommunicate me from the ‘fold’if they got wind of this. I had just joined that pathetic legion of‘nurture clan’ that needed to save all the 'others' that didn’twant saving. I was officially a cliché. I really didn’t mind itmuch.

Sigh.

Hewas kind enough to let the sex subject filter through the fissures ofthe remaining conversation. It was a sort of unspoken current thatradiated around us cautiously for the rest of the afternoon. A tacitunderstanding, on both our parts, of how all this would pan out. Hewould go his way and I would go his way and that was that. He wouldnot wait forever, he wasn’t even waiting now. Yet, somehow fortoday it was enough to simply talk about it and for me to get fullyon board with the concept of what this would be.

Fistof all nothing would happen, then perhaps it would happen a few moretimes and then nothing would happen all over again.

Alaya Vigyan

I don’t quite remember when I read about it or where for that matter but I haven’t ever forgotten this phrase. I believe it is Sanskrit for a house where one goes on throwing into the basement things they want to do but do not. I suppose the trouble with me is that I live in that basement as I ‘pretend’ to exist outside the house.

I suppose one could say that independence and the realisation that one is finally in charge of oneself brings along with it a hard look at the ‘self’ in question. In the past I have gone to great lengths to avoid this very confrontation and it is not something I take lightly. My sanity - hangs as it does by a thread - depends on my believing my illusions absolutely. My optimism, my insistence on pretty alternate realities and my overt idealism rests on consistently resisting the truth that I am actually a cynic. That in truth I believe in nothing and I feel even less. I must pretend for myself more than anyone else, or else all my I’s fall down. I was seven when my first therapist told me that I was ‘very creative’. In therapy that is code for ‘escapist’. I also discovered years later when I read his reports that he perceived me to be extremely manipulative. He noted that I easily preempted his changing tones and the tenure of his every question and told him exactly what he wanted to hear. He said I had astonishing control over my emotions and never let my face betray any sign of weakness. He wrote that I smiled at all the wrong things. He found me endearing because I was altogether too perceptive but in a quiet, inquisitive, blushing sort of way. He also observed that I would collapse under the burden of my mental ministrations and my grandiose emotional cover-ups. He stated that my behaviour, if it continued, would lead to an emotional breakdown. He predicted a collapse of the facade, most likely a suicide attempt. He recommended me for mild shock therapy at eleven. I had the first of my three subsequent ‘collapses’ three years later.

I have never really been able to view any of it as an illness though. I don’t suppose anyone who is depressed ever views it as an illness… it is merely an ‘awareness’. I am one of the select few that realise that perhaps it would simply be more convenient for me if life were to end today because I would not have to go to the bank or feel alone or pick out what to wear. Many people feel that way…not many feel that way all the time. Even fewer people cover it up with rainbows and ice-cream. I am all too aware that I don’t react to things as most people expect me too. I do not get angry…ever or perhaps it is prudent to say I cannot express anger…ever. I find it a terrifying emotion, perhaps because I have witnessed all too clearly how easily anger morphs into violence, madness. I am told now by the two friend-like acquaintances that I have not managed shake off with my attitude that this is why I don’t have relationships or friends or …what they classify as ‘a life’. And here I always thought it was because I was merely terrified of not being liked!

I argue with them vehemently about how my constant ‘calm’ shows how evolved I am, that it has nothing to do with being numb. I struggle in vain to push my puns into profundity but there is a problem. They are not stupid and don’t accept any of my neologisms for life. They can quote back just as much Nietzsche and Rimbaud without needing to live it like I do to ‘feel’ unique or…something. I find myself to be little more than a verbal fidget in their presence, trying in vain to explain that the reason I prefer to stay in my room or read in the park over bar-hopping is because I simply find all company ultimately exhausting. Perhaps I have been educated beyond my intelligence. Reading people rather than talking to people, thinking rather than doing, lying rather than living…perhaps it is all finally beginning to lose its appeal. I can feel my Utopia fray around the edges as everything it was covering up struggles to swallow me all over again.

Perhaps it is because I fell in love with a nihilist and he made me realise that secretly I was one all along. I don’t want to confront this information, let alone acknowledge it so I now avoid stalking him. We had three conversations over the past two months and each one left me shaken to the core. I asked him what degree he was reading for at Oxford and he told me it was a Dphil in Theoretical Physics. He was polite enough to return the favour and I told him that I was doing my Mst in Women’s Studies and that my research focused on the human rights situation with regards to religion, Nizam-e-Adl and all that. He searched my face for something and then asked whether I believed in any of it.

“What?” I asked.

“Human Rights.” He responded.

I didn’t really know what to say so I said “Don’t you?!”

“I don’t believe in anything. It’s a moot point. I am curious why you do.”

“Well I suppose I like to think we all should have some guarantees just because we are human. Personal dignity being one of them,” perhaps I sounded sullen, I don’t know.

“Yes but ‘liking to think’ and ‘should’s’ aren’t the same thing as believing. Actually, I take that back: they are exactly the same thing. That’s why I don’t really believe in anything,” he said calmly.

I was quiet for a moment as I took in his point. “I can agree with that, but…”

“Can you?” he raised his eye brow at me, smirking a little.

“Yes, but I also think that if we didn’t have any standard of what ‘should’ happen, we would never have any motivation to change what does happen,” there that sounded good enough, didn’t it?

“So you believe that motivations and wants can change things?” he countered.

“Well, perhaps not all things but certainly some things,” I realised belatedly that I was way in over my head.

“But we have no control over those ‘some’ things do we?” he said,

“No, but I don’t think that should stop us from trying for…”

“...For?” he echoed.

“Something, anything” I countered stubbornly.

“I do” and then he got up abruptly, leaving me to sulk for the rest of the week as I was hounded by all my own some’s that had nearly driven me mad. I kept telling myself that I had overcome that blackness that I could escape it because I never let it fester. I didn’t believe in self pity. Then I heard his monotone echo in my ear reminding me that just because I didn’t believe in giving in to self pity, didn’t mean that self pity didn’t drive me in other ways.

I took to working on my papers and my research kept me busy and is keeping me busy. I started writing again, fiction this time. Somewhere in the middle of escaping his words over the next few weeks I even managed to get my US visa. I would overcome this odd little bout of cynicism. I had overcome so much worse. I spent my days strolling through Oxford listening to audiobooks on my iPod and sketching random walls and trees. This city is truly magnificent in the summer and I relished it like only I could. It is hard to hold on to cynicism when one is surrounded by colour. Then I ran into him outside the Bodleian Library on a Tuesday afternoon. He was sitting on the grass reading…well, math. I didn’t really have the courage to approach him again so I thought I would just pass right by him and into the library but he noticed me staring at him. He greeted me in his usual monotone and asked me to join him.

“Were you going to pretend you hadn’t seen me?” he smirked. I could tell he was enjoying my obvious discomfort.

“I really didn’t see you,” I stuttered back at him.

“Which is why you stopped and changed directions, of course,” he asked.

For some reason he was oblivious to how impolite it was to slap someone in the face with the knowledge that you were all-too aware of their obsession with you. I don’t really know how badly I was blushing… it was a habit of face.

“You blush quite violently, you know?” he observed calmly, the expression on his face unwavering. So now I knew. I also knew that he was cruel. I chose not to acknowledge either observation as I sat down.

“So, you like me.” he stated in a bored voice, while staring at me intently waiting for a reaction. Seriously what was wrong with him? Was I not allowed to salvage any measure of pride? I could actually feel tears build up and prick the back of my eyes. I had never been this embarrassed and I had never felt this vulnerable. And heaven knows that 'vulnerable' was my default setting. I was also horribly paralyzed, so getting up and running was not an option.

“My mistake, believe me I think I just got over it,” I whispered, it was the only way to keep the tears out of my voice.

“No you didn’t, actually. If you liked me in the first place you already knew that I wouldn’t care either way, so if anything, my being a complete ass right now would only make you like me more.” He wasn’t triumphant, at least he didn’t sound triumphant. He was what he always was: brilliant, incisive, honest and bored.

“Yes I get it, I’m a masochist. I won’t bother you anymore.” I said in a rush, I really needed to get out of here before I broke down.

“You don’t bother me. I am flattered actually. You are a lot more observant than most women I meet and I wouldn’t mind in the least getting to know you better. As long as we were clear on what it all means,” he said calmly.

I have never hated myself more than for asking the next question that followed, “And what does it all mean?”

“Nothing,” he said. “If we were to see each other it would be about sex and that’s all it would ever be. I don’t really ‘believe’ in relationships” he was waiting for me to react now, I could tell. He wanted me to be offended or petulant or perhaps violent so he could safely put me in one of the neat little 'woman' boxes in his mind. I could tell that he had been on the receiving end of all of those reactions before.

So I took a deep breath, “No of course you don’t.”

He raised his eye brows slightly. I don’t know how I managed it but I was perfectly calm now.

“Although I do think you have presumed a bit much. I won’t deny following you or liking you either but the fact that I never tried to do anything about it should clue you in on the fact that I don’t ‘expect’ anything from you. And that’s what really bothers you isn’t it, ‘expectations’? Well trust me on this it bothers me more. I expect nothing, which is why I did not try. So you humiliating me like this doesn’t really serve any purpose. Although I am sure it is extremely entertaining.”

I was done, I was even slightly proud of myself when I noticed that he was surprised by my response. Of course he didn’t betray any overt reaction, just a subtle tensing of his jaw but that ghost of a smirk disappeared. I got up and left.

Then I cried.

It has been several weeks since that particular fiasco and I have been rummaging frantically through the drawers of my old dreams to keep myself occupied. I have been editing old short stories I had written that I never thought worth much; I have been writing poems for poetry competitions; I have been applying for jobs with the BBC, the United Nations and well anywhere that would have me. I have also been listening to Saeen Zahoor and Iqbal Bano, which tells me that I must be more miserable than I thought. I know all too well that I am barely keeping the blackness at bay. The mere fact that I haven’t left my room in six days is due to the fact that I sporadically burst into tears without provocation, rhyme or reason. My research continues as I sift my day through Pakistani news stories for my thesis and I was finally beginning to approach some semblance of a schedule until today.

He wrote me an email. It took me almost twenty minutes to decide not to delete it and then another ten minutes to read it. It was short, two lines and as with all our confrontations it was a challenge.

I realise you will probably decline, you should decline… but I was wondering if we could have lunch tomorrow. I shall be outside the Ashmolean at 1:30 pm.
-N
I know perfectly well that I should decline and I know perfectly well that I won’t decline. He is right, I am a masochist but then again I have been waiting to feel for a long, long, long time now. I shall feel this, whatever this is or will be.

Wish me luck Captain, I haven’t finished anything in forever.

The Changing of the Guards

I

It happened rather suddenly.
Time struck the Earth still, overhauling its inhabitants skin-side out.

He walked into the tiny tavern, apprehensive of His audience but conversely confident in His purpose. He was completely oblivious to the reception He would receive but was perfectly willing to wait for the one He wanted. The crowd was small and merry in that naïve, frivolous manner that only crowds can be. They would have to do. The best beginnings were always humble.
He would make something of this rabble. Of that He was absolutely certain. So He approached the nearest table and sat opposite a desolate looking youth who seemed almost as lost as his age demanded of him.

“Incomplete, isn’t it?

“What?” the youth murmured sullenly.

“Everything.”

II

They were a number now, twenty nine to be exact. It was always easy to spot when an idea was catching on. A tangible buzz simmered silently in the atmosphere as every head bobbed up and down in unison, acquiescing without reservation to everything He put in it. Yet, He still approached with caution ... knowing all too well the cosmic consequences of a hasty entrance. He was well aware that real allegiances always sprung from that one ephemeral triumvirate: courteous courtship, supercilious sagacity and carefully cultivated fear. They were still raw and sceptical, frequently hounding Him with ‘why’s’ and ‘whens’. That would all soon change but this, this was the time to keep it simple… true even.

“You are all equal and you all deserve to be treated the same.”

He neglected to mention that ‘equal’ and ‘same’ were not exactly the same thing. Equal was how They ought to be treated and sameness was a state contrived to conveniently keep Them under control. Luckily They never really bothered with semantics. That was what made His job easier than even He could have anticipated. It had always been there and now He could practically taste it: a desperate yearning to be part of something that would allow Them to escape their own little worlds. That was what really made Them so easy to manipulate: They were always waiting for an out, any out. And all it took was convincing one of Them - truly, deeply planting the seed. It would sow and scatter itself.

He had picked a good host.
Humble, quiet, intense and ….not at all easy to dismiss.

Soon enough, however, the host began to develop his own ideas. It had always been a problem with operating from among Them. They couldn’t help but improvise and place Themselves in every equation. Much of it had to do with Their blasted call for constant attention. Some might argue that He sponsored the sentiment from His own desperate need. This was why He was inherently incapable of indulging any argument...ever. So far, however, the only changes He could detect were relatively minor. A mere matter of the Man confusing his own mortality with the Voice's omnipotence. It would have to do.

At the end of the day, They all had an innate capacity to take what He gave Them without question. Programmed as They were, to receive more than give. It prevented Them from having to figure it out for Themselves. It saved on time and responsibility and it motivated Them. It worked. And there was absolutely no conceivable reason to question it. He loathed curiosity. Always struggling to identify that infernal congruent where the first ‘why’ cropped up in their vocabulary. He figured that He had managed to stamp it out of most of Them but like a virulent habit of mind it always had the power to arbitrarily pop up in some. Still, He gathered that the ones that stuck with ‘why’s’ would be bred out eventually.

Their presumption would never be tolerated by the rest.

III

A river of souls as far as the eye could see.

Terrifying in its magnitude.

They marched in time to the clinking and clanging of gold chains that bound Them in neat, narrow queues of thousands. The men and women were always kept separate. Only allowed to roam amongst each other on select days decided by the Man.

The men walked in front. Their chains gleaming, molten in the blazing midday sun as They murmured the Words the Man had given them. The Words helped lull Them into a complacent haze, one that now bound the land. The Words inspired a distinctive brand of drowsy comfort that was impenetrable. Some would come to call it security. They murmured incoherently under Their breath as They trudged their way up the mountain day in, day out. The women were bound in ropes behind them. They were clad from head to toe in dark drapes: their eyes shut, their minds shut and their mouths shut. They did not murmur the words, mutely following the followers.

Among the legion two had been overlooked. They scampered in and out of the Man’s presence never straying in his line of vision long enough to be given the message and handed the rules for their initiation. They were innocuous and rather easy to overlook. They were young and the Man eventually decided to just let them be. Two children could hardly be of any consequence to the grand design. Moreover, one of them was a girl.
They couldn’t change anything.

IV

The Girl never understood any of it. The rules, the unending routine and the eternal obedience was suffocating. And all so that They could supposedly survive something that would someday prove to be 'eternal'. She refused to believe Them when They insisted that being miserable now was the only way to be happy then. Where ‘then’ was They never knew. It was nowhere in sight.

There were so many things she felt ashamed of and she was never able to understand why. She felt ashamed for wanting to be pretty; she felt ashamed for wanting to talk to the Boy who roamed the camps and who had seen her coming out of the lake without her clothes on; she felt ashamed for not feeling ashamed that he had seen her naked; she felt ashamed for wanting; she felt ashamed for not believing the Man who stood on the Mountain; she felt ashamed for not discarding the answers he gave to the questions They never asked by avoiding the ones that They did; she felt ashamed for wanting not to believe in Him; she felt ashamed for not caring beyond today and what she hoped tomorrow would bring.

She felt.
And the feeling was always shame.

And so she did what those who ‘feel’ shame do.

She pretended.
She faked an entire existence, opinion, appearance, agreement and obedience. It was rather easy in the end. They only required appearances and cared little if those were cultivated or contrived as long as they were there. Finally, she could walk among them freely. She tread softly and concealed herself in the shadows that the mob cast as They walked along the scorching sand. As she followed in obedience, They never noticed that her hands weren’t tied.

All she really knew for a fact was that the Truth got you killed and the Lie could protect.

She could lie and lie well.
And so she survived.


V

The Boy had observed a kind of knowing in her quiet subversiveness and it haunted him. It was quite subtle but he had managed to pick up on it. Perhaps because he had been searching for it. He felt that his hunt for another was finally proving fruitful. Being free had proven to be a rather lonely business. He observed a subtle scepticism in her stance and he had carried that around in his chest for weeks. So he nurtured the hope of her with him everyday as he shifted in Their shadows across the timeless landscape.

Occasionally They would ask questions. On these rare occasions the Man would always respond patiently “Because He commands it”. They always felt that this answered all their reservations, that it calmly polished over any itchy doubts. He never understood why They could never comprehend the blatant farce, why it simply didn't compute. Surely, so many different questions couldn’t possibly have just one answer. It wasn’t even an answer, truth be told … it was an even bigger question. The Boy knew then that the Man must be very clever to know how to answer all questions with one answer and still be believed, revered even. So he never asked his questions. His curiosity always seemed trivial when set against the Man’s infallible answer.

She was different. She never expressed any curiosity in what the Man said and seemed awfully content to merge in with the landscape. Whenever their eyes happened to meet across the crowd he saw that she didn’t believe the Man either. Neither did she care about what the Man had to say about Him. Yet the curiosity captured in her eyes could hardly be contained. It was of a different vein altogether, something he didn't think he would ever be able to fathom. A deep yearning to understand the 'underneath'; the 'root'; the 'mystery of and in everything. To scale every treacherous depth. That curiosity practically spilled over. It was too real to be taken in with one universal answer or any call to obedience. It was what had stopped him in his tracks that day by the trees when he saw her come out of the lake. It wasn’t her naked form or her beauty… it was curiosity. He had never witnessed it in anyone his age. They never looked at anything like that. The children did but they eventually always lost it, usually around the time they learned to speak. A child would ask a question and They would counter the curiosity by binding it with their chains of tradition. The frail glimmer would dim immediately until it faded completely.

It was all about Control and They all agreed that the Control was all about Power. Power had always been a problem with their kind and so it seemed the safest course to give all of it to something that was more Powerful than Power.

Even if it wasn’t there.


VI

A day came when They had been marching for what seemed like a thousand years and was probably much more. They moaned and complained now. They no longer felt that effervescent passion for the rules that once united Them.
They weren’t changing the world anymore. They weren’t even changing themselves.

The Boy and the Girl had known from the beginning that no matter what the Man said or what the Man said He said (they could never really tell the difference) none of this had ever been about Change. It had been about not changing. It had always been about standing still for all eternity. They just did it by constantly moving...by trudging forward aimlessly. It was all about following so that They could remain in a convenient stasis-like sludge that would flow in whatever direction was demanded of it.

They never saw it. They couldn't see it and the Boy and Girl had learned to keep silent over the years. They noticed that as ritual began to lose its lustre, They grasped on to the chains even more desperately. Now wearing them like garlands, wrapped them tightly around their necks. They deluded themselves into thinking the cuffs were studded with diamonds. The women began to view the ropes as yards of silk.

Obedience was an integral part of the blind belief demanded of them. The Boy often asked the Girl, as they walked amidst the throng, if she thought that it was Them who had to believe blindly or whether the belief itself was blind? She could never comprehend the question. The only absolute she could conceive of was 'feeling'. There was simply no alternative to feeling. They always approached the Blind Belief as they would a jigsaw puzzle, gathering a trinket piece every few decades.
They never solved it.

VII

The Man always kept himself at a distance. He always felt that mingling with Them might somehow corrupt his purpose. Over the years he had begun to forget much of what his purpose was, although he knew for certain that if he kept them on course he would succeed in it. One thing he did remember was that part of his instructions was to make every last one of them follow the Words. Sometimes he felt uneasy about the Boy and the Girl he had lost in the crowd so many years ago. He constantly chided himself for having overlooked them, for not coaxing them into compliance as He should have done.

Over the years he had begin to notice how They would all occasionally lose sight at a moments notice and break rank. They had even begun to ask some of the old ‘why’s’ again. Whenever it happened he always thought about the two young one's he had lost. While it was true that the Boy and Girl were hardly any kind of tangible threat, he found himself unable to shake the Voice’s apprehension and rage about leaving anyone behind. He vaguely recalled something about how all of this could unravel at the slightest demonstration of disobedience.
But nothing had happened yet.

And he had to admit, if only to himself, that he could no longer see them. Over the years the Boy and the Girl had become invisible and neither he nor any of Them had been able to locate the two in their midst. Still, he was positive about their presence. He knew without doubt that they were still there, skulking silently among the legions. Their presumptuousness was a perpetual pressure choking his heart, silently mocking everything he said, did and would come to do.

VIII

A minute, a millennia: it had gone on too long now, to be traceable. The path was carved in concrete, deep and consecrated by the footprints of the following. Its legitimacy was its length. Its longevity- a testimony to its strength. They had always been susceptible to the notion that if something was old enough it ought to be kept that way, just because someone else had at sometime kept it that way. The Man became a legend of insurmountable proportions. They still followed in his tracks and left a place for him at mealtimes. Many would argue that he was more powerful as a Phantom than he had ever been alive.

They had never really been a species conducive to Change. And whenever Change came it hated having to deal with Them, because They were immune to all its beautiful intricacies. They sat and slumbered nearly oblivious to Change as it enacted its subtle dance in the backdrop of their days, always longing in vain for a rapt audience. It was nearly imperceptible through the fog of absolutes. Yet every hundred years it wafted through the land without fail because there were two who welcomed it. Two, who waited for it. The Boy and the Girl were the only ones who recognised that Change was the only thing that didn’t. And so every hundred years they were reborn in silence to counteract Change into that generation. Every hundred years they were allowed to utter one sentence of their Truth. Some listened, most turned away, others pelted them with rocks but the Boy and the Girl had only this one privilege. That every hundred years, they were granted a moment where they would speak and be heard.

They always resisted. Some were broken by that resistance but most of them were frightened by it and broke others. ‘Don’ts’ and ‘Cant’s’ were by now a habit of face, of skin and of mind. The predictability of the pattern was infallible. Even though the Boy and Girl no longer hid in the shadows they were still not openly mutinous. They waited. Waited for their sentences to collect in the well of consciousness and inimitable Time, until there were pages. And someday there would be a Book to counteract the Words.

This Book would map the span of thought...free thought.

IX

Every hundred years He would tally the numbers and there was a birth of a smile which never carried to full term. It never prospered long. Every hundred years there were those Two; always staring up at Him, blatantly defying His inevitability. Every hundred years they refused to adapt and bow their heads. Their fruitless revolt often seemed as permanent and intractable as His own assault. He felt that the Boy and Girl saw Him clearly from their pitiful position and this always made Him uncomfortable. None of Them ever saw Him or dared to even want to.
Those Two, however, stared up at Him unblinking. They always rejected Him. It usually made Him more apprehensive than angry because He had no idea how they did it. He could never spot them from his pulpit. It never made any sense. It also made Him feel somehow incomplete, cosmically lacking. And so every hundred years there was a thunderstorm and a flood and many of Them would die. As They perished, They would cling tightly to their chains and implore for His grace but those Two would rather drown than grasp the chains for support.
And yet they never drowned.

Sometimes He found himself feeling jealous of their odd brand of belief. What else were they searching for when they could actually see Him? They were not Blind. Why then did they not Believe?
Every hundred years He would ask them “What makes you think you can possibly win?” and the Boy and the Girl would smile and echo in unison “You do.”

And every hundred years He felt a terrifying twinge of Doubt.