Muss Es Sein?

Must it be?

“I have seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it” – Salvador Dali

I have been told that I possess a lens people wait for: the stolen secret, that elusive key into people’s faces. It isn’t all that surprising really, I have been reading faces and pre-empting my responses in accordance to what they share for quite some time now. I no longer even need to make an effort because all I see when I unlock them is the Ugly.

It is why they terrify me still.

There are no honest faces, mine least of all.

It is rather tiresome to realise that I can affect almost anything by making people believe what they want to about themselves. All people want, really, is to be validated. I suppose, if I am honest with myself that is what I have wanted practically all of my life. A silent, salient nod of approval from Them.

This year finds me working on myself, which is something I have never really admitted to be doing before. I have, in the past, sought great solace in the pretty premise that my flaws make me unique and are therefore a worthy foil to drag around for the rest of my life. I am revising that assumption now, only because I find myself alone again at much the inconvenient juncture to be alone. Confronted and caught by that catch-22, bouncing up and out of its perimeter again, I must deal with an old adversary: 'Marriage'. Having been asked by too many to consider ‘where I am going next' has made me recognise that this proposed hypothetical tangent certainly doesn’t involve an altar or ruining some poor, normal, innocent, human’s life. For some reason, those I meet do not find my carefully cultivated empathy for the happiness and welfare of strangers to be as endearing as I had hoped. 

My family has expressed collective relief over my abandoning my antiquated notions of fidelity, love and soul-mate-ship as pre-requisites for matrimony. But are rather upset at my insistence that my recourse lies in working my way back out of Pakistan, hopefully on a more permanent basis this time around and hopefully towards a PhD.

I often feel bad for them, because they haven’t managed to ‘fix me’ and Lord knows they have tried with the best of intentions. I am currently nurturing a most constant guilt for insisting on being ‘that girl’ who just won’t settle and be and want like everyone else. Who is ‘headstrong’ and ‘stubborn’ and ‘wrong’ because she felt abandoned at some twisted trajectory by two parents who both managed to move on with their lives but couldn’t possibly figure out what to do with this thing they’d created. Sure, it doesn’t help that she read herself into a cemented, unshakeable skepticism, unwilling to settle for anything less than a fairytale that the fore mentioned doubting default knows to be, well…a fairytale.

I have been presented with a long list of ‘musts’ for life, and depressingly (but unsurprisingly), my own musts completely circumvent it. The list is pretty standard: Marriage, Money, Children, Stability and Society, the latter pertaining to the opinion thereof (sic). Mine reads something like this: Writing, Studying, Working, Adopting (alas a compromise of wants) and …Alone. I am also presented with an ad hoc alternative: find a friend. Because, of course, finding friends has always been my strong suit. Let alone the kind of friend I could convince to covet my neuroses ad nauseam.

Recently, I stumbled upon a film called ‘Immortal Beloved’, a superb depiction of Beethoven’s life and love for the woman he alluded to in his will merely as ‘beloved.’ The film struck several chords with me and I now find myself listening to ‘Ode to Joy’ on loop every day as I drive over Cavalry Bridge on my way to work on Ferozpur road. There is a perverse magic in listening to a deaf man’s epic dance as one drives past cracked pavements, starving children and scuttling amputees. It makes for bitterness that I feel, he would have appreciated, nay …cultivated.

It was said of Beethoven, that he was a proud, boorish fellow. So consumed was he, with his genius that he deemed answering people’s casual greetings in streets as a common courtesy far beneath him. It took twenty years before he was vindicated and excused for having been deaf and thereby…a tad defensive. I can love him for this, for my disability lies in a floundering mind, a feeble tongue and a defensive heart. I would rather choose my failing though, so I have to add an element of cowardice to the collective crutch I use as an excuse to shun others.

If only it were all real! I wish I could mean my mind. I wish that I did not crave a friend. That I did not dream of a home and a false sense security that came from knowing that money had little place in happiness but a large part in the appearance of it. That I could somehow, transcend my need to look for broken people to be with and around, simply because I felt that they would not judge me.

Which is nonsense, of course, the broken thrive on judgment.
I should know.

At the end of the day, I recognize that there is a surreal sibilant romance in seeking after the crutch, the scar, the spill, the smash and the corner. As Cohen put it “There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” While my rational self rebukes and reviles me for still cradling those shards, my mind must give way to habit. For it is said, that of all the Greats: Mozart, the Prodigy; Bach as Gods Violin; Tchaikovsky, the Weaver of Beautiful Nightmares; Vivaldi, the Romancer and Liszt, the Thunderer…there has only ever been one, whom they call, simply ‘Maestro’.

Es Muss Sein. It must be.

Es Muss Sein. It must be.

Mea Culpa

What is the approved conversation for a man or woman caught between the crevices of this place, where each clings to their own shard of debris?

What ought to be our greeting as we pass each other in this flood?

Meted out in minutes, condensed in colour and composition… I am saturated, it seems. There are times when I wish I was merely lost but I have come to realise that is not it. I know exactly where I am and I choose this misery every day. It is all my fault and my patience is the pattering of images that I must constantly pause and pillage through without preference.

Did I mention I miss you?

I still feel the bitterness of our encounters linger across the tunnel of my mouth and I spend my days drowning you out of my mind. I plunge through the moments with my head held high because I refuse to let you relish this particular victory; of having broken something in me that I cannot identify well enough to work around.

I have never really been pathetic before, at least not like this. Somehow, I manage not to wear my bruises openly but I find myself waiting for you every morning in my mirror, dear foe. I wait for you to batter my words against as I drive my way to work. I wait for you to slip your smirk across my desk as I edit hours of ad hoc news nonsense for pages that will never see the light of print. I wait to know myself, once again, in your impression of me.

I hate that it is only you who can tell me who I am.

I hate that it is I who let you.

I shall work around it though, I shall bury you soon enough. Presently, I am listening to Piaff and trying to comprehend why you classified her as ‘bitter’.

“All I feel when I hear this woman is barren waste lands, they are idiotic to think her bitterness beautiful.”

You were wrong, I hear only frailty, but then again you loathe that more.

Of course, I couldn’t possibly understand, could I? I am small, you said, ‘with potential’. I cannot even condemn you for your judgment of me, when I so crave it still. I wish I had asked you to elaborate my demerits because I no longer see anything when I look in the mirror. All I see is what you showed me and while it leaves me feeling incredibly small, it is all I seem to have.

I shall never laugh again, at the sad sufferer. A broken heart truly is a terrible curse: the pins that claw at the insides of your cheeks every time you smile; the scars you wear like medals; the laugh that never quite sounds like it belongs to you anymore. It is excruciating.

You have no idea what nakedness of the mind is like, do you? The kind where a stranger speaks of you, for you and to you and wins on all counts. No one has ever seen your mind naked, unmasked and unprotected and my feeble attempts to unearth it were fumbles at best. I recall they made you laugh.

Looking back makes me realise that I failed you in the worst way possible. I let myself become ‘known’ to you, so completely, enough to become boring. That was it, wasn’t it? You spoke of honesty, but what you were alluding to was a truth that was both capricious and coy. I should have guessed. I ‘know’ nothing of you except what I was hoping to find. You reside everywhere except in that corner.

Now, I find myself brutally raped of emotion. I am broken and I forgive you. I will always forgive you.

You were right, I shouldn’t.

You were right, I will always fall and never rise.