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.