“…I
told my mother ‘Mother I must leave you
preserve
my room but do not shed a tear
Should
rumour of a shabby ending reach you
it
was half my fault and half the atmosphere’”
It
is rather amusing really, the consistency with which life manages to
revise your assumptions.
I
suppose it ought to be amusing…
But
it isn’t.
All you really know anymore is that this is more than you wanted. It is more but in its own way it is too different from what you ever expected to be any easier. Then again no one ever said it was supposed to be easier. It’s the beginning of a new year, a time that follows all the old clichés of beginnings and endings at their most omnipotent. There is nostalgia and melancholy and if you’re really unlucky the element of old illusions shattered. It’s a bit of all of that and a bit more, there is still that lingering unease at the back of your mind of something you haven’t done yet, because you no longer know what it is. People are wrong when they say it’s hard to find what you’re looking for, the hard part is figuring out what to do with yourself once you’ve found it. There is no security in losing all your smokescreens.
It
is a nakedness that would put even the most promiscuous to shame.
That is why the notion of having a body and mind at the same time always troubles you. While you may love having a mind, you have always loathed having a body. Even as you relish having a ‘different’ mind, you can never take pride in having a ‘different’ body. It has something to do with that pathetic propensity to still want to be perceived as beautiful more than feeling it. That’s cosmopolitan culture for you, no matter how far you evolve as a person or try to, you still root yourself with the one appreciative glance cast in your direction by a complete stranger. The fact that the ‘right’ body type or hair type or skin type or clothe type can still somehow trump who you are terrifies you and so you make sure never to put yourself in that equation. You convince yourself that the only one worthy of you will look straight at what you feel you are and not what you look like you are. And you know that doesn’t happen so it gives you a good, legitimate excuse to scoff at ‘The Game’ for most of your life. Your story and ‘your’ version of it have all allowed you to avoid this mess. But now you are re-thinking it all... you have been spotted scoping out the rules and the right technique to consider to help you succeed.
You
filthy little hypocrite!
It
is the reason why you have problems with words like “Love” when
there are people attached at the end of the sentence. You have always
been inherently uncomfortable with writing about romance in tangible
terms. You never wrote love poems. You have also been altogether too
comfortable making everything else romantic to overcompensate for
this all-too-obvious deficiency. One can trace it down to anything
really…most standard clichés apply all too well for you. You have
your pick of daddy issues, broken mirrors and cracked crowns, the
naïve girl falling for the childhood love who chose otherwise …but
it all boils down to pride at the end.
Romance
requires the relinquishing of pride. The pride that is connected to
admitting you crave it, the pride that links in with asking for it or
looking like you want to be asked, the pride that plays with a fear
of rejection and the “He should go first” syndromes but most of
all it is the pride of admitting you can’t do it alone, that you
with all your smoked mirrors and all your art and all your poems and
all your jokes and all your colours and all your dreams and all your
songs and all your sarcasm are not enough.
You
could never admit that. Not after having survived everything you did
and that too by retaining the ability to laugh and sing and dance.
How could you admit that something as trite, hackneyed and …
‘commercial’ as “Love” was enough to make you give
in to needing someone besides yourself. You couldn’t do it, you
didn’t do it and now you want me to help you admit to yourself that
the only way to begin is by letting go of the one thing you base
yourself on keeping in check? You want me to convince you to admit
you need to give up your pride?
I
cannot.
But
I can ask it of you, for both our sakes.
I
think even you will admit that the thought of being alone forever
terrifies you as much as it does me. All you need to do is admit that
it terrifies you more than being with someone else.
So
admit it, damn you!
Get
over your pride and admit it.
Get
hurt.
Get
willing to finally get hurt by the one thing that hurts either way.
You say you have found your answer with Arthur Rimbaud and are caught by his words “Idle youth, enslaved to everything; by being too sensitive I have wasted my life” in the Song of the Highest Tower,1872. That this is the sentence you waited for a life time to come across. That it tells you why you read, why words matter to you more. That it is the sentence that explains you completely and by virtue of not being your own makes you feel less alone than you usually do. You feel privileged to have found it at just 25 and now you can finally move forward in a line instead of a circle. That this year is hopeful today because these words offer the vindication you needed to finally be able to continue with all your unfinished projects and half-assed dreams because you no longer need them to fit some illusion that could explain all the subtext.
Today
was the right day to find this sentence, slow and over-sensitized
from the moment you opened your eyes at 11 in the morning, you lay in
for ten minutes listening to Dylan crooning “Love minus Zero”;
you took a shower and ended up writing random poems on the steamed
glass and feeling a lot more excited about Papaya shampoo than one
should; you took your bike down to city centre and sat listening to a
street musician play ‘Amazing Grace’ on his bagpipes and you
cried a little for some reason; you decided to watch a
movie…alone…and it ended up being “The Reader” which struck
those silent chords that some movies manage to strum idly in the
background of the rest of your day; you did your groceries and
decided not to buy any cheese and started the new year with
strawberries and iceberg lettuce for lunch; you walked the rest of
the way home listening to Martha Wainwright’s Cohen cover of “The
Traitor” and you felt the overwhelming urge to write something,
anything, everything.
I
suppose that’s what this is: you’re little something, you’re
little anything and you’re little everything.
Don’t
let it be for nothing.
The
judges said you missed it by a fraction
rise
up and brace your troops for the attack
Ah
the dreamers ride against the men of action
Oh
see the men of action falling back…
