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.

Love and live

I've decided that it's absolutely ok and in fact not at all uncool to blog about post-breakup things. Especially since said breakup is now ancient history and pretty much most of the world (and especially me) has stopped giving a damn. Therefore, a note on being alone. Somebody once told me that the hardest part of a breakup is the end of an entity you became a part of, the end of an "us". You return to the state of being "me" again, and in the meanwhile, if you've given enough time and energy to the relationship, you've completely lost track of who that is or even how to be that person. Much madness ensues--the inability to be alone, rebound relationships, etc.

Looking back, this seems like a horrifying way for relationships to work. We live in a culture (that includes a frightening percentage of humanity) that prioritizes the collective over the individual--our ideas of democracy, fashion and even society itself. And love just happily skips along into the party. The popular perception of love seems to be a noble giving up of the ego, of immersing your self in something "greater"--as if greater necessarily need be greater in number and not just scope. I'm all for the idea of building something "greater", but it does seem dangerous to give up being something you are just to be part of something else. Rather, I would imagine love to be something that lets you be exactly who you are and embrace something or someone else in all their uncomfortable, wondrous reality. 

And let's face the hard facts--we are all ultimately alone, in body and mind. I'd hardly be the first to point out profoundly that everybody dies alone. Yes, the entire history of humankind, every power struggle and work of art somehow leads back to that fact. We may ignore it or try to erase it by building elaborate fantasies such as happily ever after, true love, and so forth, but there is no getting away from it, really. You are the only one who will ever be there, the only entity, sane or insane, that you will meet all your life. It's nice to have someone along for however long in the ride, but that's all it'll ever be--a little company.

Call me a cynic, but I'd rather face that and hold on to me. And still love and live.

Undone

What if you stood before an enchanting lake on a hot summer day, a cool, enticing lake, and yet don't step in? All you have to do is strip off your clothes (there's no one looking, and you don't care anyway) and plunge yourself into the delicious water and you know you will forget the harshness of the sun, the thirst of your skin, the dust that coats you. You can imagine the water enfolding you in its embrace and you know instinctively that you can trust that you will enjoy every minute of it. Yet, you stand at the water's edge, looking in, looking around, half-longing, yet holding back.

It's not that you're afraid. You know you can probably swim the depths of this lake. Well, you're not really sure, the water has frightened you in the past--always that fear of drowning. Yet you know that you need to try before you know for sure whether you can swim or not. The only way to confirm or disprove your own fears is by facing them. Yet that's not why you hesitate. Sometimes you enjoy facing those fears, there is a certain excitement to that sense of drowning, almost running out of breath, before you break the surface and remember to kick your feet and move your arms and fill your lungs with oxygen, eyes stinging with water, yet unable to close them to the light that proves that you're alive. No, a little fear of drowning could never dissaude you from the rewards of a swim on a summer day.

But the fact is that you would rather stand here and stare at the sparkling water. There is a hint of a quiet breeze rippling the surface of the lake on the otherwise quiet afternoon, but it doesn't touch you--only stillness all around. The sun is beating down and the grass is letting out that hot humid smell of summer green. Insects dance in a huge column in areas over the grass. And the water beckons. And somehow, this moment is enough. It's enough to know that the water is there without having to throw yourself into it. It's enough to imagine the depths of that pool, imagine being deep in its belly and look up to see the sun streaming in, oddly distorted and pretend you're a fish. It's enough to imagine all the pleasures of finally escaping the dreadful, sultry day and giving in to the beauty of the water. Somehow there is enjoyment in knowing that this is all the moment will be, that it will remain unfulfilled. Yes, this is enough, just this feeling of anticipation.

Not everything must reach its logical or desirable conclusion, must it?

Waning Lyrical...

(... As opposed to waxing, get it? Sigh. I must stop explaining my jokes.) You may ignore this if you a like. Just a little parody for my amusement...

I've just eaten my fill and
I'm ravanous
I've just woken and
I'm already sleepy

every hour I'm away seems
like a second.
the minute I return
stretches for hours

your eyes are like endless pools of warm honey
but really, closer to molten lava in hell
your voice is dark and smooth like chocolate
or rather like a blackboard when nails rake it.

serious symptoms of an illness, you'd think
but my love, these are symptoms
of the long-awaited cure:
I'm falling out of love!