Sombremesa

"To Live, would be an awfully big adventure" - Peter Pan, JM Barrie

  
Dear Stranger,

This seems to be an opportune time for odd lilting conversation, not that there is ever an inopportune time for subjectivity. I find myself at a new beginning today and for some odd reason I feel the need to share this one with the likes of a likeness I cannot fully deconstruct. This beginning comes in the form of a document, emailed to me this morning, a document in a foreign language that proclaims the finalizing of my divorce. Seeing as I currently lack a confidant, I now find myself constructing one in this letter. You might think this a morbidly rococo juxtaposition on my part and you would be right. I am seeking attention, as loathe as I am to admit it. That said, I do not know whose attention it is I am soliciting and on some off tangent this anonymity awards me a small measure of comfort. 

 I am twisting my mind around this loveliest of Spanish words 'Sombremesa'. It makes reference to times spent around the table after dinner, talking to the people one shared the meal with. It is time spent digesting both the food and the fragile foundations of friendship. I am unsure about whether I can classify my recent socializing around tables as 'the sharing of meals' in any genuine sense of the word but it would not be dishonest of me to assert that somewhat-edible or better put, perishable, items were consumed. And sufficient time was taken to savour them sufficiently. Perhaps classifying the subtle stringing together of loose-ended misnomers and post-substance metaphysics as the beginnings of a friendship may be a stretch but whatever the cumulative repercussions of this Sombremesa, they appear to be favorable. They are certainly compelling and jarringly, cripplingly honest. I do not know if this is how one cultivates a friendship, by cloaking ones' self at the onset, imbibing several social facilitators in the middle and stripping bare at the end? Is this the basis of an acquaintance-ship that lasts? Or is it a peer-ship? Or is it merely an almost-recognise-her-face-ship?

One might think of this particular variant of letter writing as a bout of triviality but I feel that the importance of saying things and having them matter to someone can never really be under or over estimated. That said, there is no way of knowing whether any of what I shall say here will matter to anyone, but in some part this disinterest is also oddly consoling. I shall never know, who you are, who I am addressing or how you are being addressed and that means we can converse freely. Or that I can vent freely, whatever Kafkaesque parable better suits your purpose. I suppose in some manner, I am setting this fictive conversation against real ones I have just encountered trying to test the boundaries of my own limitations as both a wordsmith and human-oid. I fear that I have indulged myself beyond my capacity for self-indulgence. I fear too that I have educated myself beyond my intelligence. I fear finally, that I have experienced a sense of complacence. I fear most of all that I am enjoying it. 

 “They took it for granted that if they went he would go also, but really they scarcely cared. Thus children are ever so ready, when novelty knocks, to desert their dearest ones.”

Perhaps you are bored already. This is, after all, a purely selfish catharsis on my part and will afford you nothing of value in exchange, no vindication, no valor...not even a pedestal. I have always envied people their chance to compose long intimate letters in films, the kind one finds being superimposed at the preface or conclusion of a historical biopic. I wish that I could compose these words on an aged papyrus scroll with a quill and scratchy, blotchy ink to preserve the perverse nostalgia and neologism I am attempting to bring here, while my defenses are down enough to award me the indulgence. Silicon screens and clacking keys are so utterly unromantic but they cannot be helped. If I were given the choice I would have employed pencils. This is something you actually should know about me…I adore pencils. Ever since I watched that magnum of romantic comedies, ‘You’ve got Mail’, I have relished the idea of someday receiving a ‘bouquet of sharpened pencils’. I would write you this letter in pencil if I knew who you were and I assure you it would serve more poignantly than those crass love notes composed in blood by clumsy lovers.

I am not sure if I am going about this the right way, or if there even is such a thing. After all, how does one construct an intimacy? In normal situations people consider approaching a curious stranger and striking up a conversation, others employ that age-old art known as flirtation. Some stalk people on Facebook and Twitter…whichever method one employs, there is a subtle loss of self that is demanded of the enterprise. The twisted waltz of socializing requires one person to initiate the exchange, invent an approach and meticulously cultivate an opening. There are moments in between, where every perverse slip-of-tongue and every arbitrary hand gesture is superimposed in the idle vignette of ones' clouded retinas and encased in the hazy short term memory one is desperately trying to wipe clean with a hyperbolic blend of potent substances. Each layer added, removes a layer of self-consciousness and superimposes something about the self one was unaware of in their own capacity. I find I talk too much, so I try to pace myself. That pace allows me the time to think and then I find I am thinking too much and immediately switch to talking again. I discover I can be crass, and this is an odd jolt for me. I have always been quiet and polite, you see, now I am discovering a boorish element in my jip-jive conversation that occasionally leads me to question whether my current choice of social conduits will cause lasting damage. 

"Stars are beautiful, but they may not take an active part in anything, they must just look on for ever. It is a punishment put on them for something they did so long ago that no star now knows what it was. So the older ones have become glassy-eyed and seldom speak (winking is the star language), but the little ones still wonder."

In my mind this involves a loss of power or ego or something that I know I do not possess in any case, but the idea of losing it is overwhelming enough to hold me at bay. This is why I have never triumphed in matters of the heart…or the libido, if you belong to the school of thought that prefers to distinguish between the two. I have no one to be intimate with, so I have ascertained that in such times it is best to muster up all of ones’ creativity and invent a confidant. It is not so difficult really, inventing intimacy. All the enterprise really requires is cause enough to warrant confession. In our case, somewhat of a soliloquy wrought in affection. The inventory for intimacy essentially rests on three things, I find. The first involves the right number of 'others' to cloak your conversation in sufficient banality so that the few sentences you mean to make poignant can be identified in contrast to all the nonsense. This is paramount, for conversations that try to be important in their entirety inevitably fail from the fall-out of sheer expectation. The second, is a viable target. Someone you are capable of surprising with your odd sensibilities but someone whose reactions you are not too invested in. This ensures that if a transient intimacy is actually struck, it will be equally surprising for both parties and then promptly dismissed as a serendipitous fluke. It is essential that it be dismissed so as not to become dangerous. The third and final premise for inventing intimacy is eye-contact...or the lack thereof. This is as much a science as an art...one must measure connected gazes meticulously against stolen ones and disconnects. No one should be too aware of being the subject of your scrutiny at any given point of time but someone actually must be the subject. It is a perverse scavenger hunt for smiles and sibilant undertones. So here, I shall address you as an old friend and pick up an imaginary conversation left at the tail end of our previous encounter, one that I shall construct as we go along. 

 But where do you live mostly now?"
With the lost boys."
Who are they?"
They are the children who fall out of their perambulators when the nurse is looking the other way. If they are not claimed in seven days they are sent far away to the Neverland to defray expanses. I'm captain."
What fun it must be!"
Yes," said cunning Peter, "but we are rather lonely. You see we have no female companionship."
Are none of the others girls?"
Oh no; girls, you know, are much too clever to fall out of their prams.”

 The last time we met we were contemplating the merits of the term ‘spiritual’. You were dressed casually, as you are wont to do, sitting cross legged on my sofa and denigrating me for my desperate need to find ‘meaning’ in ‘meaningless things’ that I stumble upon. I suppose, in this construction and this particular letter, you are a man. I have known you for years, long enough to experience an odd, compulsive possessiveness with regards to you and simultaneously long enough for me to be all-too-aware of your romantic failings to let this attraction manifest beyond the odd tingle in my toes or the flutter in my chest when you laugh at something I have said. One is told, that this degree of a physical charge is biologically predetermined and does not really warrant much deeper consideration on either of our parts. We are friends - in that overtly comfortable sense of the word that does not really necessitate the validation of a facebook request or a regular phone call. We are in the habit of watching films on the telephone after having discovered that it is one of the few television clichés that actually does translate beyond Gossip Girl. We do not open conversations with 'Hello's and Goodbyes' but rather with pithy one-liners that ensure the illusion of a stream of thought flowing without interruption in spite of all all the interruptions that life necessitates for us both. I find that I'm always doomed to construct you in my head as Pan. It is a most unforgivable pathetic-ality on my part. A perpetual, perennial itch to save and savor the act of loving rather than the person I am loving. The irony, of course being that, of perhaps all literary heroins I have never loathed any more than Wendy. She is the constant touchstone of every woman's underlying need to rescue and rehabilitate a man or woman or beast, and for lack of opportunity, to construct a Pan that needs saving in every stray that crosses her path. Wendy is Freud's very own thing-that-goes-bump-in-the-night of tremors and testosterone.

“I don’t know whether you have ever seen a map of a person’s mind. Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a child’s mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are probably roads on the island, for the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with sex elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose. It would be an easy map if that were all, but there is also first day at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needle-work, murders, hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate-pudding day, getting into braces, say ninety-nine threepence for pulling out your tooth yourself, and so on, and either these are part of the island or they are another map showing through, and it is all rather confusing, especially as nothing will stand still." 

  

You are in a habit of pointing out my sentimentality as a fatal flaw. You warn me repeatedly that my romance with the idea of romance is more doomed than any star crossed cupidity available on a book shelf or to be found on screen. Spirituality, you tell me is what people call their need to connect the inanity of their existence with the majesty of the stars. “There is no connection but we want one. So we have made it up. Whenever we find ourselves boring, we fake ourselves some majesty like pixie dust.” I can never seem to argue you away but I know I disagree with you. My mind knows you can be dis proven but only by someone who can articulate my own arguments far better than I. I resent this charge of plagiarism because I fear there is an obvious truth in it. And while I am willing to be proven wrong, the idea of being 'obviously' wrong grates against my skin.

You tell me one doesn’t need any of these labels and that life can be spent merely on the peripheries of the events that live us. We can just be, you say. There is no cause for spirituality in that. There are times when I feel you are a nihilist who only associates with me because you find my fanciful nature amusing. Or perhaps you are lonely enough, to want to live vicariously through someone who feels as much of everything as I do, so you can keep numbing yourself and retain the upper hand. I find that I miss our conversations after they end and therefore I am trying to plagiarize the tail end of them in this exhibitionist venture. Naturally this is a misnomer, considering there was no conversation to begin with and you (who read this) are in all probability, not the person I am trying to speak to because I am not trying to speak to someone but for them. This is through no fault of your own but rather because of my colossal failings as a perennial verbal and emotional fidget. 

 “Peter: Oh, the cleverness of me.
Wendy: Of course, I did nothing...
Peter: You did a little. 

Wendy: Oh, the cleverness of you.”

 I suppose for this letter to be truly two-sided and honest, neither of which it is, I am obliged to ask after your health and general well being. I hope for your happiness. Moreover, I hope that you are one of those individuals who do not expect happiness in general and are therefore pleasantly surprised on the odd days where you find yourself contemplating the meaning of your existence in a good, strong cup of coffee and find your faith, sitting at the wheel, waiting for a traffic light to change in the middle of the rain. I hope that you are not the narcissist I am dreaming you up to be and I hope that I am not in love with you already. I hope you are a firm, solid, stable quadrant in this dizzy world and I hope you resist all of my melodramatic ministrations and not-so-subtle manipulations on this forum to render you otherwise. I hope you are able to forgive me my desperation. 

"You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.”  "

 

I pray, dear Stranger, that you will excuse my clumsy attempts at keeping this archaic romance alive, not with you per se, but with the idea of you. I am afraid that most of my ideas are the dying legacy of some long-lost antique cousin and that I should let them pass peacefully but I find that I am not quite prepared to lay you to rest yet.

You, who speak in sublimation's as I do.

You, who struggle with premises and prefaces alike,

You, who also, are forever incomplete.

And wish to remain so….

“There is a saying in the Neverland that,every time you breathe, a grown-up dies."