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.

Little Mermaid Diary Entry

6th February, 1993
Afternoon

Dear Diary,

Baba wore a suit today.
I hate it when he wears suits. It is like he is someone else.  They make him look rich.
They are also neat and straight and it takes me more than 11 minutes to iron them.

There are no colours or rumples and the ties are extremely stupid.
Why do people want to hang themselves with coloured silk stripes just so they can look like everyone else?

I don’t think I hate anything more than a suit.
Except diamonds.
I really, really hate diamonds.

Maria

An Amicable Divorce

“He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife”
                                                                                                 – Douglas Adams

I just invented God.

Again…

Granted, I am by no means the first to do so and the idea isn’t exactly original but it always surprises me when I catch myself in an act of ‘creation’. It goes without saying that it is much easier to want to believe in my versions of god, while recognizing with perfect clarity that these are figments of my imagination.

The way I figure it, better mine than someone else’s.

I am currently working on deciding whether I am going to bother planting It with a gender this time around, seeing as I still haven’t forgiven Its predecessor for having invented such a blasé mechanism to segregate the species ala carte. In fact, I haven’t forgiven that one for feeling the need to segregate any species in the first place. Suffice it to say, we both had our issues, they were many and they were mangled. We have parted ways now and it has been described by most as an amicable divorce on all counts. The primary reasons cited for the proceedings have been: irreconcilable differences and a gross misrepresentation of facts. Custody battles over my soul and his rights to said subjective/neo-modern abstract currently ensue en' masse.

To be fair, He had His reasons too. I was simply unwilling to believe everything He said without evidence, reason or reason-ability. I openly flouted most of his rules and adamantly refused to extend respect He took for granted He deserved. I took ‘nothing’ for granted and never relinquished my mind and will to His dogma. My infidel-ity knew no bounds as I actively scavenged for alternatives to replace Him with.

In short, I was a miserable failure at being any kind of subject.

Rather like an obtuse Keirkegaardian Ironist.

I shall expound a bit on where this new incarnation stems from and where it might be headed. It is an odd business, this exercise of ‘designing’. I feel powerful already…and I hope I know better than to fall down that particular rabbit hole. This new -yet un-named - avatar springs from a composite of colour, impressions and the remnants of a broken heart. I believe the latter feature might render It more sympathetic to the human condition but I cannot yet offer any substantial guarantees on that score. I’m afraid that is the trouble with creating anything: there are never any guarantees. The act of creation is always subservient to how it is perceived and that function is always carried out by someone or something else.

The functional merits of the new prototype, for convenience lets call it ‘gOD’, are yet un-determined and I am quite liking the idea of them staying that way. I am hoping to avoid the usual strains of 'human projecting ‘omnipotence’ into the atmosphere that in turn allows him/her to control all other agents partaking of said atmosphere' business! As any invention of the mind, gOD will ideally remain a work in progress, a lot like Baskin and Robbins ice-cream. The range of ice cream flavours remains endless as empty canisters are perpetually on the look-out for the next curious taste bud to create its own variant. A God/ Ice-cream analogy, I find, makes as much sense as a God/burning bush analogy; a God/ Holy Spirit that-makes-god- ‘God’ analogy or a God/God’s son-in-one analogy. For one it is chirpier and much more aesthetically pleasing. I also feel that with the sheer volume of authorship he/she/it commands, gOD is unlikely to find favour among the ‘belief’ audience. I think that rules out proselytizing of any kind.

I find that I am quite comfortable with the idea of not having to preach.

I have always regarded it as a tiresome business.

Now on to the mythology. Every deity needs some kind of ‘back story’ to lend it ‘credit-ability’. Believers who claim that a mythology lends their deity any kind of credibility are high on holiness. It is hardly conceivable that flying horses; seven gates opening up to legions of virgins in some warped brand of  Valhalla; God's dead progeny not-dying to save humanity and parting of bloody seas can actually legitimize any creed of creator.

What it does proffer is ‘market value’.

It allows one to ask Charlton Hestern to ride chariots in a skirt and flail large sticks about on screen; it sells gold crosses and several strings of ‘last supper’ paintings; it introduces new and increasingly complex methods to wearing head scarves; permits blonde bimbo’s like Anne Coulter to appear on TV and actually command a considerable audience and let us not forget: IT SELLS BOOKS! Imagine any religious text without the android half man/half elephant deities or without burning bushes and sporadic, apocalyptic wiping-off of species to spurn angrier species that will repeat the process et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
* (apropos my new Gentile friend QN)
Oh, and on that note, how come no one bothers to ask this: If the creationists did get it right then Adam and Eve came on earth and had kids, and their kids had kids…and ...wait- a- minute.

Can anyone spell ‘incest’? And to think people take offence at being regarded as Ape-descendents a thousand times removed. I’d take a monkey grandpa over a perverted manage'-a-million any day!

It is this marketing of mythologies as facts that drives religion and the religious to unimaginable ends. The new brand of faithful subjects like the Scientologists and Mormons have jumped on to this particular band wagon with unprecedented fervor and the nonsense about magic underwear and reiterated stigmata’s are practically a requirement these days considering – to quote Bill Maher – “All the good shit is already taken!”

On a slightly more neutral note: I have to state that personally my beef lies more with Belief than the Deity it ascribes to. The distinction between ‘faith’ and ‘belief’ is an important one and it desperately needs to be made. In today’s vernacular ‘belief’ is a business and it pertains to God as he appears in religious dogma and text; the more benign ‘faith’ is a term employed by the apologist who often wants to distinguish his or her views regarding the god-subject as 'personal'.
 The latter expression holds considerable merit when it pertains to a deist and/or mystic perception of god. In its mind-logic incarnation this strain of ‘faith’ often revolves around the Einstein/Epicurus/ Spinoza perception of an ultimate designer that we cannot know or define but ‘could’ ‘possibly’ exist. In its heart-love incarnation it tends to seep into the mystic’s devotion towards ‘the indefinable, ecstatic Love’ component. I’m definitely open to the idea that god, in the benign sense of the composite Greek Muse; the Hermit Sage or Elpis could 'possibly' exist. However, I am certainly not on board with the prevailing monotheistic definitions of what that entity is; what He wants from us and how He will get it. Not to mention all that confounded carrot-stick business in the present for the infernal, eternal ‘What-if’ End of World/s where we wont even be allowed to ask -the entity condemning us for actions committed on Its behalf -why It chose to put us in that position to begin with?
I find this strain of ‘belief’ to be completely lacking in any semblance of humility.

Ironically, it is always the skeptic who is accused of arrogance regading the 'god gamble'. Figures, the believer is allowed certainty regarding the un-certifiable, extended full license to proselytize, pressurize and promote that certainty and the skeptic who applies doubt towards all enterprises is accused of brash, rude and abrasive offence! Durant was on to something when he said “Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith, tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty.” This brings me to the ‘Respect/ Offence’ glitch.

Let me be clear: Nor I, nor anyone else is under any obligation to ‘respect’ anything without basis.

We are encouraged to respect the ‘right’ of other people to hold their own views regarding all things (a preciously fragile enterprise, which we often hope to command ourselves) but we are by no means required to respect those views. I can respect that an individual H has the right to be homophobic and consider gay people to be cursed by God, but I certainly don’t respect H’s homophobia or dogmatic assertion. The religious seldom fail to employ the ‘respect’ trump card, demanding the right to criticize others on all aspects of their lives while conveniently cordoning off their own lives from any kind of criticism on ‘dogmatic’ grounds.

This curious game of ‘Operation’ is utterly absurd.

If religious people are ‘offended’ by my opinions regarding their dogma then that is their problem (at least until they threaten to murder me for having an opinion and make it my problem). I am equally 'offended' when nine-year-old boys are brainwashed to stick knives into their back because someone who was related to Someone who narrated a book died a thousand odd years ago! What about ‘respecting’ my right to be offended?

When I was six years old, I believed, quite literally that Colonel Sanders (The Kentucky Fried Chicken Mogul) was god. I remember expressing this opinion to my mother who had a hard time concealing how disturbing she found the insinuation. She was right to be concerned. At the time, I thought the only pre-requisite required for omnipotence was kindness. Sanders had - and to this day continues to have - one of the kindest faces I have ever seen. The only alteration I affected to my god was his wardrobe. I always saw him in rainbow stripes and blue tap dance shoes. I had assumed that god was a happy fellow and that the deity was naturally (sic) inclined to sponsor magic, music and laughter. He loved happy endings and always remembered to reward polite-ness. Admittedly, I may have been a tad naïve regarding my subject matter.

This is still where I find myself - back at that beginning.

It seems the literal mind can never understand or adapt to the ironic mind. I have never been able to reconcile myself with God, because He – as He appears in monotheism- is distinctly un-lovable. Unless, one happens to be an irredeemable masochist who only falls in love with sadists that command you to love them; revere them and beg them for their mercy even when they are responsible for your being the You that you are; the You that you can be and the You that you will be. In my book that makes them responsible for all of your actions in equal if not greater measure.

I have never been comfortable with the word Atheist either, not because of what it actually means (which is, ‘not a theist’) but because of how it is perceived. The term has come to be equated with a barren disregard for the numinous, which for an artist such as I…is everything. Granted, this is through little fault of the authors of the term but over the years the word 'Atheist' has adopted a silent synonym: scientist. Atheism is largely equated with logical, critical and deductive reasoning (not that this is a bad thing). The term seems to alienate the subjective, intuitive, contemplative, artistic component that yearns for an 'unexplainable' component in their lives but have no particular need to call that x factor 'God'. 
For the artist or the bohemian bandit, if there is a god to be had, it is to be had in that space of serenity that commands everything. That veil between conception and realization that nurtures our thoughts and dreams right at the precipice before they appear out of the unknown and surprise us with the immense power we are capable of. The power of thought; of compassion; of song; of spirit; of art and yes of something as hackneyed as Love perhaps. While I sometimes do take Poppers claim of the absolutes seriously, I do have 'faith' in exceptions making life worth living. “If something that explains everything inversely explains nothing” than there is definitely some character to be ascribed to that ‘nothing’ dangling on the fringes of that particular absolute...

The last time I saw gOD, I was on the F-train in Queens headed towards Manhatten. A seventy-something year old man sat across from me in the sparsely populated cabin and he was playing the violin. He played Beethoven’s rendition of Symphony 9 ‘Ode to Joy’ and he never opened his eyes or bothered to look at his audience. I did, because I was it. The four other people in the cabin either had their headphones to distract them or a novel to drown out any need for audible stimulation.

In that moment, he was Holy.
Partly because he was magic, partly because he didn’t care and partly because I was the only one listening to his revelation. I rode the subway with him all the way to Soho, until he finally looked up.

Then He was g-OD.

When the doors opened, he packed up his violin and left...

And I knew I would find someone else, somewhere else tomorrow.

Little Mermaid Diary Entry

Late Night Time

8th November, 1992

Dear Diary,

I really wish I had a brother or sister. It gets very lonely being alone all the time.

It would also be easy to be special then because I would be older.

But what if my brother or sister were special-er?

That would make me invisible and not in a fun way like a fairy or something.

And then I would never ever be alone.

I think I will think about it.

Maria

The Phoenix and the Unicorn

“The only unbearable thing is that nothing is unbearable” – Arthur Rimbaud

I suppose I am finally beginning to realise why intelligent people often fumble back upon the expression ‘never say never’. As opposed to initial appearances the 'never' doesn’t betray false bravado rather it provides an air-tight exclusion clause for the perpetually misguided. Not taking a stand (whether good or bad) allows us the ability to recant, change, deny and even fabricate where we are and what we feel. I suppose my previous post precludes me such luxuries but then again, I figure Beentherella is inherently born of contradiction and that remains the one fail safe I can always employ. Maria Amir simply figures that seeing as this is her blog, specifically constructed to nurture her phobias and delusions, she is at liberty to throw as many tantrums as she likes and take it all back whenever she wants to.
I, quite simply, miss being able to write the truth because I find I am no good at all at speaking it and doing neither is suffocating all three of us.

I have been back in Lahore for over a month now and I am quite terrified to report that not all that much has changed. Neither the city nor Maria have truly evolved and I suppose this was to be expected given the persnickety natures of both. However that isn’t to say that there aren’t tangible shifts. Maria is spending her time conscientiously avoiding both her family and her swamp-full of memories and is forging ahead trying to be simultaneously practical and optimistic. She is working towards taking her GRE so that she can apply for PhD scholarships, leave and avoid being ‘matched’. Lahore is somehow lonely this time around. It seems to be scared of itself and for some reason Maria can no longer tap into that innate sense of ‘belonging’ when she drives on the mall on lazy afternoons listening to ‘Mera Piya Ghar Aaya’ in her dinkie.
Beentherella is quite adamant that the two factions: ‘practicality’ and ‘optimism’ are mutually exclusive to begin with. She believes that Maria is adamantly avoiding all songs, films or literature that can exacerbate her malen-coma simply because she is missing N more than she cares to admit. Beentherella insists that Miller’s formula of the ‘best way of getting over a woman/man is to turn them into literature’ is the only solution to their mutual predicament. I, ever the faithful trapeze artist, am simply trying to manage both parallels as equally and faithfully as I can. And yet, while I know that I can hold in a great deal and that I have no problems being a social pariah, I realise that I value beentherella much more now. I feel that as much as we have tried to obliterate her in practice, she tends to crop up in job interviews where Maria will refuse a perfectly wonderful opportunity on the basis of some perverse standard of idealism that I feel they both still need to uphold. Luckily, neither of us have any qualms about employing Beentherella’s regular assistance to circumvent rishta’s on that same principle.

Being back in Pakistan is proving to be rather surreal, perhaps because it is alarmingly easy to ignore everything that surrounds us once again. We are driving around the city these days simply to avoid being in company for very long and I am spending the rest of my minutes reading Pyrrho and ‘actively procrastinating’. The latter contradiction referring to the fact that I am consciously choosing to ponder for hours on end about general nothings I feel we ‘ought’ to write about but have somehow lost the courage to. I am seriously considering writing letters to strangers as I used to when I was younger, it was certainly a less volatile method of communicating with people without actually ‘communicating’ with them. Perhaps I shall search for an address, somewhere that sounds lost…like Bavaria.

Maria is writing up lists these days, scores and scores of lists: shopping lists, goal lists, life-lesson lists (sic), grocery lists and lists of things she wants to try learning. She has started a diet-plan recommended by a nutritionist that diverts much of her attention towards missing things like coke, cheese and Abbot Road ke channay which help her to avoid missing other ‘things’. Beentherella is spending her hours perfecting her caricature of an imaginary friend that can fill in for the tangible best friend she has not yet managed to locate and I spend my time marvelling at how one person can manage to avoid them self in so many mirrors.

We have always been fascinated by two mythical contradictions: the Phoenix and the Unicorn. I find that at present both creatures manage to capture Maria and her doppelganger quite effectively. Maria is currently steamrolling her way into the appearance of maturity and some odd notion of ‘re-invention’ that she feels may vindicate the mess she has made of herself. She is labouring under the apprehension that she can fundamentally re-align who she is if she acts the part of the cold, practical, adult who -after having been burnt and reduced to ashes- can emerge triumphant. The odd thing about the mythology of the phoenix is that after its thousandth year no matter how productive the life of the bird, it is destined only to live as long and as 'like' its old self. This tends to negate all ‘reincarnation’ paradigms where redemption is ultimately offered up as a cosmic bribe for correcting one’s flaws, failings and the breaking of patterns. The only guarantee the phoenix myth proffers is the perennial presence of a pattern.
Beentherella on the other hand is flexing her elusive might to see how far she can push us all into obscurity. She has always considered loneliness to be a pinnacle and now seems to be settling in with the concept much more completely than she ever did in the past. She knows that we will not find him again. We, none of us, will manage another beautiful nightmare that is simultaneously true and terrifying enough to keep us morbidly intrigued; challenge our flailing convictions and allow us to jump again. I cannot honestly define whether the unicorn encapsulates beentherella or the elusive friend that she survives to seek. Marianna Mayer in ‘The Unicorn and the Lake’ describes the creature as “the only fabulous beast that does not seem to have been conceived out of human fears. In even the earliest references he is fierce yet good, selfless yet solitary, but always mysteriously beautiful. He can be captured only by unfair means…”

All I really know is that I have managed to get both of them in the same room, huddled in the same corner, sat on the same bench and writing on the same page. Of course, it is all artifice at preset: a cross between Dali’s assertion of false memories and true ones being akin to jewels. The false ones always appear the most real. And yet, it is better than the gaping 'nothing' that preceded it.
So for now I shall be content with the busy business of making something out of all of us.

The End

“The palace of crystal may be an idle dream, it may be that it is inconsistent with the laws of nature and that I have invented it only through my own stupidity, through the old fashioned habit of my generation. But what does it matter to me that it is inconsistent? That makes no difference since it exists in my desires, or rather exists as long as my desires exist.”
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

And so I have reached my pinnacle, only to discover that it was always destined to be my demise. I have spent my two months of purgatory in New York and am now back in the glorious, languid heat of Lahore. I have also realised the futility of any attempt at trying to be myself; of actively coveting this sad repository of imagination. Many would say ‘I have been found out’ and mayhaps I have. Beentherella has been discovered, brutally raped, publicly ridiculed and put to shame by the vilest of all foes. I am told that my thoughts are offensive and hurtful to those around me and that I must apologise for them to no end. I have done that too…and yet, I cannot help but think them. The thought still persists, it still plagues. I can - in no sincere measure - summon up genuine guilt for this one exercise that has offered me solace over the past five years: writing for an audience. Much like Plath's journal, my blog- this trite, cream corner in cyberspace has been my ‘Sargasso’: my litany of dreams, directives, imperatives and ideal-isms.

Still, my experiences in the past month have taught me the weight and value of a poker face; of the silent spirit and of the repressed thought. Perhaps it was an inexcusable vanity on my part to assume that my feelings and my truths could remain my own. That my idle stream of perpetual procrastination could continue un-interrupted and that my casual corner would be frequented only by complete strangers. It has been the most asinine attempt at self-regression, this perpetual monologue of barely-contained melodrama that I had longed to continue clear of consequences. It was all bound to collapse and so it has.
Beentherella has left the building. And I shall turn once again to scribbling in waiting blank pages and to my type writer that has never betrayed me with delicious illusions of an admiring audience. This, whatever this compulsion is or has been: to be known, read, understood and perhaps even identified with is a whimsical, pathetic exercise at its very core.
It is pure, primitive need.

I am told (now that I have navigated my own personal minefield of damage control) that no one really has the ‘right’ to tell a truth that is lucid enough to illicit a reaction from another being, any reaction. I feel far too much like a mutilated, dilapidated Howard Roark, for I too ‘have no sense of people’. And I have not yet had the luxury of stumbling upon any treasure trove of ‘harmless, simple, benign’ personal truths that I can convey without fear. I must admit in turn, that I cannot even crave such hollows. In this particular instance I cannot help but agree with Rand, and I refuse to accept 'anything except what seems to be the easiest for people: the halfway, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.' Because Beentherella, despite all her pretty-isms was bold beyond measure in this one capacity: she never lied. I have finally felt the full brunt of ‘Them’ and ‘Their’ ability to cripple even the smallest of self reflections with a finality that both she and I are unable to disregard. So I shall bow out with the last shreds of my dignity precariously intact to once again traverse the pinnacle that is Loneliness.

My lesson remains to return to my former silence. It shouldn’t be too difficult to revisit a state of perpetual placidity, for I was quite adept at it not too long ago. A lesson, I now feel quite foolish for having ignored for so long, in some naïve attempt to tell my truth and finally discover myself. I have wallowed shamelessly in the delusion that harsh lessons gleaned from the past can be discarded in better times for humorous ones. It is always, always, always safer to remain locked. No one has ever paid a price for keeping silent...at least not in public.

So I shall leave you now - friends, foes, strangers, acquaintances and fellow Hobo's to move on to the bitter business of ‘Being’.

Beentherella was the figment.

Maria Amir is the fact.

Solitaire

“The best is the deep quiet in which I live and grow against the world, and harvest what they cannot take from me by fire or sword” – Goethe

I have taken up an old habit once more and it is oddly refreshing to discover that I can re-visit past trivialities with such ease. I am playing solitaire again and remembering how much I used to enjoy not needing to surf the web, type up resume’s or worry about checking my mail box for emails that never arrive. It is a relief to re-discover the simple pleasure of still finding myself capable of whiling away the hours mind-numbingly playing solitaire. My aunt recently noticed my new past time and commented on it.

“It’s the word I can’t stand ‘Soliatire’,” she said with a shudder. And I shall always treasure this fundamental difference between us…on her behalf, for it gives me hope that one of us seeks glorious hope over the oddly bitter, blandness of truth. You see, it is only love of the word that makes me love the game.
“Yes, but that’s just because the name represents a morbid sort of truth,” I said.
“Absolutely not! That isn’t truth. No one is all alone,” she added vehemently.

I became silent at that, which is my usual response to any conviction that I hold but simultaneously realize I cannot convince (nor do I want to) another of. I am incapable of arguing about ‘the big things’ because I recognize that our views on all the big unanswerable’s stem from individual experience and yet I can carry a conversation about them with relative ease. Perhaps it is an irrational fear I harbor of accidentally proselytizing. I loathe the pulpit tradition of preaching answers to unanswerable questions. I do not think I could stomach that in myself.

Yet, I long for such conviction and I am envious that I cannot find it or even want it. After all, if we human beings are the sum of all that has happened to us; the people we have encountered and the way we are wired to perceive those dualities, then by definition ‘conviction’ cannot be taught or passed on or somehow triggered. Whether or not one appreciates the word ‘Solitaire’ for what it means, is in a similar vein to whether or not one can inherently view and measure the world in a proverbial glass of water that is either ‘half full’ or ‘half empty’. Sponsors of the latter metaphor will never really admit or embrace their position because it ‘sounds’ wrong, even if it is true as the case may be. I, for one, know with reasonable certainty that the only limited freedoms I have ever known, I have found in loneliness. It is a twisted impasse to navigate: Solitaire. Because the word rests, not on belief or perception but rather on …countenance. It is that lingering query that rests on the fringe of all things. One can rationalize it away but one cannot revolutionize it.

Does one believe that life is spent alone, surrounded by people who can never know the ‘you’ that lurks in the corner of your skin; your address; your bank account; your diploma’s and your photographs?

Or

Does one believe that we all tend to think we are special and that is precisely what connects us into an intricately woven tapestry of souls, spaces and the side-effects of solipsism? If everyone is special then by extension no one can be special.

Those that tend to believe the former (whether or not they admit to it) fall largely into that odd fixture of never knowing how to live in this world without being of this world. They tend to be quite comfortable living outside the world. It is ‘the world’ that is uncomfortable with their existence, with their innate ability to function outside of the social and sociable premise. Minorities of all varieties always offend majorities because they provide a constant reminder of how the latter has not yet completely ‘won’. How any majority will always just be that, a majority, persistently at the precipice of becoming a monolith but never quite managing it. They know, they recognize invariably that they are always alone and that ‘people’ must always be kept at bay lest the tide of their emotions, their needs, their wants and their …issues swallow the individual. That the frail spark of self, having sprung up in spite of all that surrounds it shall be squelched. And so they defend it ferociously in their fortress. They are that misshapen, congealed puzzle piece that is left behind once the picture is made and complete. They are unnecessary and yet that is their only claim for clemency… that they do not aspire to be more than what they ‘are’. Embracing the word ‘solitaire’ means knowing that you are enough for ‘you’ to survive and also knowing that this admission somehow bars you from the world outside and those that live and flourish in it. To flourish in the world requires the pretence of mimicry, of marginalization, of momentary, monetary couplings that mean nothing.

The other creed that learns to detest the word ‘solitaire’ tends to prosper, simply because they are able to seek solace in society. They can love and also be loved (in my experience, it is the latter that is trial some). They have learned to walk among the sea of faces and not trip in the tide, to dust themselves off and move in unison with the battalion. They march for progress, for the constant illusion of movement and money. They learn to survive and to do it well. They travel through time in the perpendicular, tangent North and they grow old in so many mirrors bearing the same reflection.

I presently traverse in terrifying limbo, knowing that much as I would love to delay all decisions, life is all about knowing your take on that infernal glass; on this confounded word; on those blasted rose-tinted glasses. Life cannot be carved or commissioned from within this in-between layer of time and perception that rests uncomfortably wedged beneath the real, above the unreal and beyond the surreal. This place reminds me of the 24th century story of Chuang Tzu, who dreamed of a butterfly and was unable to decide if he was the man who had dreamt of being a butterfly or a butterfly who now dreamt of being a man. Was it the dream that lived him or the other way around? And yet for both of them, the dreamer and the dreamed one, the conflict lies not in awakening but rather of choosing how to keep dreaming.

The need to choose this premise, and quickly, stems primarily from the fact that I have decided to go back to Pakistan in October and work again, while applying for my PhD. It also rests in the undeniable ‘solitaire’ truth of having turned twenty-six this year and realizing what this means back home. It means that re-joining my grandparents will mean being unceremoniously thrust back into the Lahore marriage-market as ‘soon-to-be-going-bust stock’. Sadly, it does not do (in Pakistan) to insinuate that one may just not be suited for constant companionship, much as there may be times when one craves it. To be honest, I am not even sure whether I am arguing for or against marriage most of the time. I am perfectly clear, however, on the fact that the institution terrifies me either way. If I am lucky enough to be happily wed, housed and family-ed then I must re-discover who I am (a tedious re-evaluation) or where I shall pocket Beentherella and her whimsical, beautiful nightmares. If I am not and grow old and alone then I will have to live with Beentherella forever and that is an equally petrifying proposition. I am told this particular catch-22 is really supposed to hit home at 30. Apparently, I have four more years to self-combust.

“You’re a girl. Girls get married,” my grandmother tells me flatly.

I know better than to argue with a seventy-seven year old woman who has raised five ‘girls’.

Diary of Discontent

"New York is something awful, something monstrous. I like to walk the streets, lost, but I recognize that New York is the world's greatest lie. New York is Senegal with machines”– Frederico Garcia Lorca

And so I have discovered Lorca. I am deriving immense comfort from my newly obtained copy of ‘Gypsy Ballads’ most of which I spent an entire day reading at Barnes and Nobles today. It is reassuring to read a fellow malcontent at his prime and I long for the ability to complain and whine about the inevitability of the machine with similar grace. Still one must do what one can and my not-so eloquent ravings must suffice. I have failed and am failing miserably at summoning faux enthusiasm for America, for the future and most definitely for my ‘prospects’. My family finds me astonishingly ungrateful, seeing as I am not frothing at the mouth at the sheer serendipity of mayhaps becoming that next immigrant, sporting her hard bargained H1 to strut the streets of Manhatten.
My usual exaggerated enthusiasm is noticeably absent and even I cannot fully fathom why.

While I realize that I have never had much in lieu of ambition, I do not think that is what bothers me the most about being in this city or in contemplating staying here. It may have something to do with how big everything is here. I have always harbored an unnatural fear, aversion and apprehension towards big things and America is all about big every-things. Still the practical side (of my family, certainly none to be had in myself) reiterates that all opportunities lead here and I would be a fool (sic) to ‘pass this up’. It may very well be that all universal history rests on a handful of clichés and that we are all measured by how well we live up to one particular cliché in question: success. I am reading far too many fragments these days to make sense of how I feel or think. Though I am not making much progress with the latter I am profoundly grateful for the constant pleasure and isolation that books still bring.

I have been trying to muddle through Novalis’s ‘Logological Fragments’ these past two weeks and I desperately wish I had been a philosophy student, if only so that I could pretend to understand him. I ‘feel’ though, that his words are like chimeras and while I am struggling to understand their meaning their nuance is overwhelming. Novalis speaks of the greatest magician being one who would cast over himself a spell so complete that he would take his own phantasmagorias as autonomous appearances. I can imagine this all too clearly…alarmingly so. And I wonder if this is where I stand now, post-heartbreak, wallowing and whining incessantly with nothing to console me save this one delusion. This delusion that I am the undivided divinity operating within me. That I have conceived and dreamt and already written my world. That this world is ubiquitous in space and sustainable in time. The tragedy lies in the fact that it is nearly impossible to play by the rules of another world that one does not care to admit exists, that one does not aspire to be part of and that one abjectly loathes in most of its manifestations!

Mostly I am wallowing and I am getting better at it by the day. Currently the only silver lining canvasing my horizons is the imminent arrival of an old friend to New York in September. A fellow deviant, who embraces his madness more fully and fruitfully than I could ever hope to. I like to think of ‘Paagal Insaan’ in Dalinian terms. Dali said “There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad” but my friend wears his label unabashedly and by his creed ‘Mad’ is the new ‘Sane’. I look forward to mocking this metropolis in his company since I am currently shunning all company.

But it is still his voice that drives most of my discontent and his presence that still lingers on in all my out-moded, silly fantasies of 'could have beens'. Heart break is truly a terrible thing...and not for the reasons usually reiterated by romantics of every creed...rather for hope. It is knowing that whatever is to come now will never compare, that new people will never be 'new' enough and that love will now, finally have to be relegated to 'romance'. That pretty pretence, diamonds and pleasantries shall prevail. That the truth has lost and the lie has triumphed.
“You know what I find surprising about this?”
“You find things surprising?” I had perfected my own whimsical flavour of trite by then.
“I really don’t feel the need to lie to you, its rather…refreshing. I mean, I realize it might not be that way for you, but…”
“No, it isn’t. We, of the feminine vein, tend to base our happiness and Ever After’s on lovely lies. But ironically enough I am relieved to be rid of them.”
“Don’t you think that’s a bit premature?”
“It may be, but I already know there are no ‘Ever After’s’ here, so I don’t miss or crave the lying. I never really trust the lies when they sound pleasant anyway,” so I babbled my way through the swamps of that conversation.
“That’s probably why you are quite adept at this.”
“At what, precisely?” it was going to sting, I could practically taste it.

“Bitter truths…absolute honesty, even,” he sounded almost proud of me and that stung.

If he only knew.

I now find myself caught in the mirage of a morbid arcana that I don’t wish to lose. I wade through my days hearing his voice and feeling his presence mock me at every turn. He would hate me now as I manufacture a 'me' that none of my selves are. I am faking fake-ness, it appears, and this is an all time low. ‘They’ ask me to be practical, plastic and perfunctory and I pretend. ‘They’ ask me to write white-noise and I pretend. ‘They’ ask me to laugh at trite jokes, cake my face and pout my lips, take pleasure in shopping sprees and smile at cameras and I pretend. ‘They’ tell me that literature is nothing more than verbal algebra and that I need to crunch those alphabets in inane, simple, cliché’s because that is what ‘audiences want’ and I pretend.My solitary verse in the Vedanta has finally splintered and I am ‘corrected’.I am also bitter, melodramatic, prissy and self-righteous.

But I pretend my way around it.

Woodcutter,
Cut my shadow from me.
Free me from the torment
Of seeming myself fruitless.

New 'You's' in New York

It is unbecoming to infer that the killers are weak and the victims will win, it complicates the nightmare with the dream.
Put away your courage it is a provocation in their sight.

I am unable to recall clearly how many times I have now found myself perched at the precipice of a proverbial ‘new beginning’. Truth be told, I am quite weary of ‘new beginnings’, they act as the perpetual ping-pong punctuation on the run-on sentence that is my life. Individual conformity is my prescribed pattern of existence: how is one to dare anticipate a positive outcome born of such convoluted contradiction? When I was eight and being sent off to live with my father it was a new beginning; when there was pain and only the bleak, looming stretch of more pain to come it was ‘This too shall pass’; when, ten years later, I managed to escape that saturated swamp of venom, it was a new beginning; when I started learning voluntarily that was a new beginning; when I got accepted to Oxford that was a ‘new beginning’ and now as I leave to look for myself in the capital of universal self seekers the term is being thrown around all over again. There is nothing new about these beginnings, they are all far too old to begin anew and I recall that saying about a fool being someone who continues doing the same thing again and again expecting a different result each time.
Yet, it remains what we fools are destined to do I suppose and so ‘that which we are, we are’.

I recognise that my more than morbid meanderings are laced with melodrama, self pity and a rather unhealthy dose of narcissism. Still, this year and this particular ‘beginning’ has brought with it far too much ‘reality’, nearly enough to completely obliterate Beentherella. It is hard now to summon up my usual enthusiasm for …anything. I have spent the past weeks packing, roaming the streets of Oxford, silently sketching, watching movies and trying to immerse myself in my ‘aloneness’ with the same vehement determination I always reserved for it. However, this is mayhaps what I resent the most about free falling, heart-long in overtly-unrequited love. The fact that it has cemented that painful realisation that ‘No, I don’t love being alone’ no matter how good I am at it.
And I am very good at it.

Another recent development has been my inability to continue expressing myself on this particular forum. The entire point of having a ‘me space’ on the web was to not know who knew the ‘me’ in question. I have always relished this rare opportunity to actually be as brutally honest, insane and explicit as I can sans repercussions. Collecting my personal collage of cyber strangers, face-less friends and brash critics I have managed here and really nowhere else, to completely be all of my many ‘me’s’ at some time or another. Recently I have become aware of some of my readers and the axis has shifted completely. It is an odd sort of reversal being confronted with my virtual reality, by real people talking to the corporal, artificial I. There are just too many ‘me’s’ in such conversations and we are all airbrushed. I have grown up, I suppose, in the sense that I have learned to numb my mind and yet I have not lived. I have swallowed far too much and tasted nothing. The sad part is that I have recognised that this isn’t or wasn’t ever about where I was or am…it has always been about who I am. I choose not to participate in the perverse façade of being part of a ‘people’, any people. I have realised that I am quite a coward.

Recently, I was hit by one of my more severe waves of manic, suicidal depression. This time I navigated the mechanics of an End for fourteen hours on a not-so-random Tuesday spent staring at a half-full bottle of nail polish remover, contemplating how immediate its effects would be. I calmly composed one of my more eloquent- and I feel, sufficiently melodramatic- ‘last words’ and pondered how the world would go on without me and how it wouldn’t. There is a meticulous process to all suicide attempts. The vast majority are located amidst extreme bursts of adrenaline spiralling out of control into demonic descent and I have had my share of those in the past. In fact that is how ‘Beentherella’ came into being. She took birth from the ashes of my fourteen-year-old self vowing to never go down this path ever again. She was determined to remain forever vigilant on my behalf. She deemed it a terrible cowardice. Today, she knows better.

Cowardice is a failure to accept the reality and rationality of such a decision. Cowardice is want and hope for change when one knows not to expect it. Cowardice is the triumph of religion over reason; of matter over mind; of memory over meaning and above all of Elpis. Cowardice is the sound of her dancing in the rain and smiling at the stars. In general I accept reality with a fluid sort of ease, because I intuit that nothing is real. The fact that I believe foremost in ‘doubt’; in the certainty of nothing indicates to my warped self that I also believe in anything…because it doesn’t matter either way. I read once that the ancient cabalists used to pretend that man was a microcosm of sorts, a symbolic mirror of the universe. I do not know if I am narcissistic enough to believe that and yet I recognise that it is only narcissistic if one assumes the ‘universe’ to be grand. That is further complicated if one assumes that anything ‘grand’ is inherently ‘good’. In the end it all only remains unexplained. My cowardice stems not so much from fear of the unknown but rather that worn-out, perennial Pascal’s Wager: ‘Mayhaps tomorrow’.

And so I succumbed. I found myself calling my aunt with a rather pathetic S.O.S to convince me to choose my cowardice; to give me reasons to stay; to tell me it will ‘all be all right’. All so I could scoff at her in my mind while simultaneously indulging my emotional insolvency in the assertion that there are those who would care if I am dead. Whereas if anything, I shouldn’t! Sadly, that too did pass. And now the Future looms once again, hope springs bitterly triumphant as Time brings with it a tidal wave of the trivial: Harry Potter films to see, restaurants to try, graduation to look forward to, a PhD to shoot for, careers, New York big-end-ings, novels to write, thoughts to think, countries to see, hazy, misty first impressions of a tiny person I can love enough to not need to love myself and You. You: whoever You are or were or could have been or will be that I have never casually bumped into lurking behind a bookshelf; crossing the street, across a car park or sitting next to on a plane.

And to think, I lament 26 years of being the mess that is me today!

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.

Reverse Ontology

“Icame to you with a soiled philosophy of loneliness and you begged mefor an interview”

– LeonardCohen

Ifind that I cannot keep our conversations out of my head, which iswhy I prefer to put them outside for everyone else to judge andridicule. I find I am bad at judging everything. So I have decided toarchive this warped, one-sided romance for my audience of cyberstrangers. Perhaps it will sound more compelling this way. Perhaps Ijust want some sort of testimony to look back upon when this allcollapses to see why I did it. Perhaps I enjoy the honesty of baringsomething that matters too much to me and not at all to anyone elseand is therefore best stuck up on a glittering billboard to beridiculed outside of my temporal lobe. It feels a lot likeself-regressing, as if I were playing the Blue Danube backwards,hoping to somehow reverse the power of its intoxication.

Myencounters with N bring to mind something another cyber-acquaintancehas illustrated time and again in his blog: Elpis. I have followedthis particular person's online paradoxes for quite a few years now,almost always driven by the morbid curiosity I harbour for nihilismthat is manifesting itself much more clearly now. Although he alwaysworked to keep Elpis at bay, I find that I am desperately seeking herout as she runs screaming in the opposite direction. In the past Ialways read his accounts with a bitter, self-righteous defiance buttoday I have to yield to his superior insight regarding thisparticular theme. She really is a trite, cruel and fickle being.

Imade it a point not to dress up for the occasion because I knew alltoo well that he would pick up on it and comment. The only effort Idedicated to the event was to substitute my glasses for contactlenses. I entered the Ashmolean from the side entrance adjacent tothe Taylorian Library, this would allow me a chance to spot himwithout being observed. It would also give me ample time to come tomy senses if there was room left for that. He sat at the front stepsof the museum, cup of coffee in hand and looking…well, not entirelybored. He seemed to be scoping the crowd and I found thisencouraging, which I immediately realised was foolish (the pointwhere that infernal Elpis observation made its appearance inpassing). I was late. I had made it a point to be late, half in theattempt to see if he would care to wait and half hoping I wouldchicken out entirely. Apparently neither was about to happen. So Iapproached him.

Hedidn’t particularly react to seeing me there but he did flash apolite smile of greeting in my direction. The kind that means nothingbut is the indulgent courtesy that one reserves for strangers onstreet corners that accidentally catch your eye.

“You’renot wearing your glasses, was that for my benefit?”

.Sigh.

“Whydon’t you go ahead and assume it is,” I repliedsarcastically. It was my turn.

“Hmmm.So, you came. I wasn’t sure you would,” he said politely.

Iraised my eyebrows wearily and he did have the grace to manage aflustered laugh.

“Well,okay I was quite sure you would but I wasn’t entirely positive,”he indulged me.

“WellI suppose I feel all better now,” I said caustically.

“Right,so you’re thinking that being sarcastic throughout this encounterwill help you deal with …this. I suppose it is effective from yourpoint of view,” he mused, almost to himself.

Okay,so if I was going to play this …‘game’, was the only word for it(much as I loathe that term in this particular context) I suppose the only thingI had on my side was the element of surprise. I would forfeit. Icertainly wasn’t winning anything anyway if I went through withthis. Luckily, even I am not delusional enough to expect things whenit comes to emotional dependence of any variety. On that score wewere both evenly matched.

“Actually,I would rather not ‘be’ anything, if that’s possible and I amnot sure it is. However I was hoping I could try being as brutallyhonest as you,” I replied calmly, or so I hoped.

“Youwant to be a jerk too?” he asked, somewhat surprised andsimultaneously amused.

Icould honestly smile at that. “Sure, you make it look soeasy.”
There was that smirk again.

“Well,I make it look easy because for me it is,” he was giving me anout again.

“Irealise that and I promise to not let that escape my mind any timesoon,” I said quietly.

Hesounded slightly exasperated now. “So you are going to, what,Maria…pretend from now on that you don’t care about anythingeither?”

“No. I am simply going to try and behonest. Who says your nihilism hasn’t met its match in my perverseidealism,” I figured my false bravado would not be openlycontested.

Heseemed to think the same thing or so I supposed. “This shouldprove to be an interesting experiment then,” he almostsmil…no, it was still a smirk.

Weheaded out to find a place for lunch and he asked me if I had anypreferences. I decided that if I was going to be honest about this‘honesty’ thing then I should say Jamie’s. Jamie’s is arather pricey Italian restaurant owned by the BBC prize chef by thesame name. He asked me why that particular place and I told himbecause I couldn’t afford it on my own and if I was going to beberated I preferred the opposition to at least foot a considerablebill. He appeared to be impressed with my response. I was impressedwith it too. Perhaps that sounds narcissistic. I sure hope so, Idesperately needed a good dose of self-love to off-set my selfloathing and help me hold my own through this.

Over lunch we maderelevant small talk, he asked me about my taste in music and I toldhim I was a Dylan and Cohen fan. Apparently he approved, he said itexplained "a lot". I assumed this was some kind ofreference to my fore-mentioned idealism and let it pass. He onlylistened to classical music, which was easy enough to anticipate:lots of Bach, Wagner, Handel, Puccini. He asked me about my favouritebook this year and I mentioned that I had discovered Borges thisyear. He had no criticism on that score.

“So,really, why did you come today?” he asked.

“Ithink I have developed a very healthy respect for curiosity as anemotion. I think it is severely underrated how compelling curiosityreally is. Especially in a situation like this…”

“Meaning?”

“Well,on every rational, self-preserving note I shouldn’t be here. I knowI will get hurt, you have told me I will get hurt and yet here I am.So the only explanation I have left is curiosity. I am Alice as ofnow,” I said as honestly as anyone should have to under suchspeculation.

“Aptlyput, considering this is the city that gave birth to Alice,”he mused.

“Ohplease! Are you going to pull college rank on me now? You don’t goto Christ Church either,” I said indignantly.

“No,but Balliol outranks St. Anne’s any day,” he scoffed.

Ishould have stuck my tongue out at him. It would have been honest. Itook a sip of my coke instead. It seemed more dignified. It occurredto me quite suddenly that this was not as bad as I had feared until,of course, it became precisely that bad.

“So,how exactly are we going to do this?” he asked, pinning mewith a levelled gaze.

“Dowhat?” I prayed we weren’t actually going to discuss themechanics of this…whatever the hell it was!

“Well,you told me you haven’t really dated much and after what I told youlast time, I was just wondering how we were going to proceed withthis. You must have considered it or you wouldn’t be here,”he said, with what appeared to be some sympathy for my predicamentbut apparently not enough sympathy to avoid the subject entirely. Ihad neglected to mention that ‘not dated much’ meant exactlythree dates in my twenty-six year life span and two kisses. How didpeople do this?

“Ummwell, if I’m being honest…” I stammered.

“Areyou being honest?” he asked flatly.

“Youknow, I really do resent that. If anything, ‘honest’ is reallythe only thing I am being. It doesn’t come as brutally to me as itmay to you but the fact that I haven’t been put off by yourattitude should at least let me off on this score,” I supposeI said this angrily, despite all my efforts to the contrary.

“You’resaying that my brutal honesty doesn’t bother you?!” healmost laughed.

“No,of course it does…” he raised an eye brow in satisfaction. Irecall thinking that this was a truly warped thing to derivesatisfaction from.

“But,it is the brutality and the apathy that bothers me, not the honestyadmitting to them. Obviously I really do appreciate the honestyotherwise nothing would keep me here.”

He did seemto appreciate that. “My particular brand of honesty reallyisn’t the best thing for healthy relationships …I am told.”

Ihad to grin at that, “believe me, even I am not delusionalenough to classify whatever this is as in any way ‘healthy’!”

Helaughed.

Ihad made him laugh. I suppose I lost this bizarre tug –of –warright then. Women really are masochists. Suddenly I was very aware ofhow all my feminist colleagues would excommunicate me from the ‘fold’if they got wind of this. I had just joined that pathetic legion of‘nurture clan’ that needed to save all the 'others' that didn’twant saving. I was officially a cliché. I really didn’t mind itmuch.

Sigh.

Hewas kind enough to let the sex subject filter through the fissures ofthe remaining conversation. It was a sort of unspoken current thatradiated around us cautiously for the rest of the afternoon. A tacitunderstanding, on both our parts, of how all this would pan out. Hewould go his way and I would go his way and that was that. He wouldnot wait forever, he wasn’t even waiting now. Yet, somehow fortoday it was enough to simply talk about it and for me to get fullyon board with the concept of what this would be.

Fistof all nothing would happen, then perhaps it would happen a few moretimes and then nothing would happen all over again.