An aphorism is born...
It emanates from that subtle spark of self inherently ill at ease within its surroundings. A moment later it finds itself lost in the seamless scope of its own potential, scattered and fermented by doubt and deliberation. All that remains is a frail shard of the illustrious ‘what if’. Only the illusion lingers.
I wish I could say that it represents a resilient glimmer of hope but I cannot.
The days never end anymore. Nothing ends. Nothing begins.
Still there are some who choose to carry out the appearance of a life and she tries desperately to sit among them. The morning wakes in fear and she opens her eyes to a rattling window. The six minutes that follow are spent amid crumpled sheets with eyes screaming shut and senses as tightly tuned to the outside as Liszt’s piano strings. Then the sirens call, signalling time to switch in to the world and know again.
She is awake now.
Days, months, years are spent in contemplation. Odd recollections and impressions of what it means to be her, stuck inside this space. For the longest time she thought herself a writer; then she aspired to be a great reader and now she wants to be a martyr. The last, she figured as having been flushed out of her system, with her scepticism but life has a way of sticking to its plans in spite of the living, often only to spite them.
She had planned to nurture the spark in spite of life, the living and the loving. She would write words that would make strangers want to know her. She would plan her world without money or diamonds or people or ‘lookisms’. She would make it without any ‘isms’. She would sit in some secluded cabin in some god forsaken mountain with a sign on her door screaming ‘Utopia Under Construction’ to ward off all the nobody’s happening to hope of knocking on her door.
It all changed in a split second a year ago, in that horrifying city cut from glass and sky scrapers. She sat outside herself seeing things clearly for the first time and was surprised to find that all the grey still managed to produce crystals. She caught sight of a woman dressed in a rainbow-bright costume twirling six hoola-hoops, while a short man painted from head to toe in silver recited Shelley. She noticed a Japanese comedian improvising in a corner as the un-Asian crowd uncomfortably smiled in a joint attempt to find him funny. A woman in the corner played ‘sweet thing’ by Morrison as she realised that she may have misjudged this particular concrete jungle. It brought to mind the terrifying premise that perhaps she had misjudged all concrete jungles. That maybe she had limited the power of ideas and romance to confounded location and literacy.
For there, sinking in capitalist capitals, she had managed to stumble upon an underground. It had only escaped her notice because it was located amid jarring technicolour that only the irrevocably damaged could appreciate. But she found it, that circus of beautiful nightmares not cemented in foreign soil but floating to a frequency she could tune into whenever she held on to her delusions and splinters of hope tight enough. She was forever vacillating between joining the freaks and puppets and staking her days claim at benches where she could observe them from a distance. She would wait patiently, until their act was up and Tin Man and Rainbow Bright stripped down to their skins as they joined the crowd.
It scared her, the ease with which they morphed back into humans and killed all the magic. It terrified her how calmly they all soaked back the solace that ordinariness allowed. Suddenly they were the cruellest imposters she had ever encountered - traitors to magic, to hope, to dreams...ingenious, inglorious bastards of convenience.
That tryst with magic gave her something to carry back home. It offered her a tiny pearl of wisdom that echoed ‘hope and happiness and joy for all’. It kept up a streaming whisper that if she only tried hard enough - she would change something. If she was good in this old homeland which had always made her the ‘other’, she would manage. She was led to believe that she was the exact, extreme, mismatch that the place needed to challenge tradition, convention and conclusions. She never really believed it but she did hope for it. Hoped desperately in the vein of old Aesop’s fables her father used to read out to her in better times. Hoped like the ‘Frog who desired a King’ and said ‘let no man belong to another who can belong to himself.’ Hoped that the aphorism could include a woman.
She had been back for six months and the pearl had slipped silently through the seams, the screams, the solid, stoic surrender of new voices into a Somewhere she could never find. Others would always remain others in this other land of hers. And she was sitting on a slippery seat wrapped in tentacles wishing she was different; wishing this place was different; wishing these people were different...wishing everything was different. Her father told her to try making it so, but immediately recanted when he heard about the thundering thoughts that had taken root in her head. He told her that hers’ was a Muslim country and no matter how much better it got, or worse, it would remain one. He told her “If you don’t like it or you aren’t it, leave it” and his words splintered the shard completely with their unavoidable, implacable, impenetrable accuracy.
Check mate- brown and white and blown all over.
And now the fear and the anger and the apathy persists, it prevails, it even begins to pacify. She discovers a morbid sort of beauty amid the slums and shrapnel but it exists only for the freaks. The rest are drowned in a sea of plastic or dogma, dressed head-to-toe in latex or turbans. She silently bides her time all over again for an escape and this time there is nothing to come back for because this land doesn’t want others and it doesn’t need her ... it wasn’t built to stomach her. She searches the rubble for idle conversations behind all the screams that she can plagiarise for her self-serving prose.
And the story that started with shards ends with it. The day began with two deafening explosions that imploded her heart, her head and her faith and it ended with a story of six others. The others gave her something to replace her losses with.
A story of six cracks in human conscience, designed specifically to drill a point.
That there are no maybe’s and no midways. That she had lost.
