Not a Morning Person

There are mornings when you feel old. When you feel like you've understood the secrets of the world--some of them, at least--and you just want to walk up to your mother and ask her what she was thinking, bringing you into this mess. When you feel like you've lost yourself, but also found yourself after years, maybe for the first time. And it all only makes as much sense to you as it does to anybody else who isn't privy to your every thought.

On mornings like this one, when you've chosen to stay up all night, pretending to give meaning to your existence and worn yourself out; and further pushed yourself to get back into your exercise regime; and then tried to round off the health routine by having that rare breakfast, your first in two weeks... on such mornings, you feel worn thin, stretched out, left with little idea of who you are and what the hell you're doing on this little planet, because even sleep won't come (and every damn person chooses to knock on your door to ask irrelevant questions and present you with bills that are not yours and you are too broke to pay anyway). Thoughts crowd in, too heavily, and you want to drill a hole into your temples just to relieve the pressure--if only that wouldn't be so fatal.

Why are there mornings when your present seems to define your whole past and future and everything about you gets washed in the same greyness until you feel like there has never been and will never be anything, anyone other than this moment and the you in it--so dull, so drab, so washed-out and lacking in any kind of interest, a ghost who pretends she is living but knows, always knows somewhere that this is not what living is? When did that realization dawn, that you cannot take your cues of living from others, that you must make this frightening journey into the abyss of yourself if you want to find any kind of lasting meaning?

The abyss yawns
beckoning
seducing
come-to-me-you=know-me-you-are-me;
and I swim
into it (though I
don't know how)
without torch,
oxygen, map.

So clearly is god beckoning, from the other end, telling you that you needn't look in there, forget it, the looking has been done for you and the answers have been piled up, compiled neatly and placed in a way that would inspire and please the Virgo in you. And there's more... there are paths already trodden a million times by a million travellers, tried and tested... Yet they all seem to fit badly, entirely lack in imagination, are uninspiring and just plain not for you. A morning like this can drive you up the wall with confusion; if you weren't stuck in this rut, you'd probably jump up and do something really crazy just to prove you can.

And then just like that, you lose interest in mornings like these.

Just a moment

I came across a photograph of you today. It wasn't in anything nearly as romantic as a shoebox or an old diary, no; I was rummaging through my external hard-drive, took and wrong turn, and found you standing there, outlined against a blue sky and a grey ocean, apparently caught in a rare candid moment, with that quizzical look in your eye and your hand fanned out against your pocket. You are just breaking into a smile and all the charm of your sunsign--all that almost childish charm that lets you get away with many, many slips--is all frozen there in that moment, leaping out, as if competing with the wave caught mid-climb behind you. I smiled back at you and remembered the day, the time, those seemingly perfect moments. Though so many things have changed, so much has gone, water under the bridge and passing clouds bringing rain, there was still just you there, as you were to me then and as I imagine you now. And I didn't want to walk into that moment and speak to you, ask you how you felt at that moment, tell you what followed and how, I didn't even want to hear your voice. I just wanted to sit down at the shore, beside you, let the waves continue their journey, taste the salt on my lips... For a few short seconds, I just wanted to be... in that moment, with you.

*

I sometimes wonder if it's true that we've lost our appreciation for photos what with the unlimited bombardment of our eyes with images that range from barely recognizable to brilliant, from the truly remarkable to the banal and random. Maybe when there were fewer photographs to be seen and when they had to necessarily have a physical impact, printed and touched in glossies and mattes, we appreciated them more. But that photo of you reminded me that we'll probably never lose our sense of the poetic, the sense of the beauty of anything our senses can perceive. That photos will always freeze those moments and force us to imagine the rest, force us to imagine the rest of the story in 3D, in time, in love, in the gaps our memories have, in nostalgia.

Friends

That night, it hailed on you and me, unexpectedly. We were quite vulnerable to the rocks of ice that the sky was hurling with inexplicable wrath on us--you, completely unprotected, and I, carrying only a notebook and a folder, with not a tree nor a building anywhere in sight. Not that we could see much anyway: it was late in the night, in a little mountain town with its early sunsets and no streetlights. I pulled out my notebook and folder when the raining rocks got big enough for us to start discussing concussions, and when I offered it to you as protection for your head, you exclaimed, (quite ridiculously, considering the situation): "But your notes! They'll be drenched!"

And in the midst of wondering at the strange twists of life that had brought me, from the hot southern city where we don't even have a proper word for snow, to this place of hailstones as big as my fist; in the midst of paranoid yet oddly calm contemplations about the irony of dying in this dark little hillside with only you for company; in the midst of cursing myself for having forgotten both umbrella and torch; in the midst of yelping at the stones that were assaulting our necks now; in the midst of all this, I could only think of your remark and barely contain an urge to burst out laughing.  And remember why we'd been friends once.