Dog-Ears

Sit down beside me. You do not have to say anything, and neither will I. As long as we do not talk about it, it does not exist. So, we must continue this way, never talking about it, never making it true. You do not feel it as long as you do not say it, and neither do I if I avoid saying it, too. We can stay this way, in the ambiguity forever, of me never knowing it, of you never saying it, but in the end, you will have said it a thousand times over, and I will have said it, too, only in a language only both of us ever knew. The world will not know about it, and why should it? This is a tête-à-tête, and we must be quiet and we must be soft. We must stick to the whispers, corners, and shadows.

We must only meet at parties and among people. We must only talk in glances. I will know what you mean, and you will know what I do, too. This is a given. It is the only given. I do not know many languages, but I am fluent in this one. And then, we must dance with others; we must dance with every person before we approach each other, so it seems as if nothing is amiss, nothing is at play. And then, we must behave; we must maintain decorum. The walls have ears, too. No one must hear us; we must talk in silence. You will smile and tell me how you feel. I will smile at you, and you, too, will know. But we must never say it. We must never utter the word. We must take the time we have, and then, we must part our ways as people part their ways. We should go on with our lives. We should marry other people, or not, but we must never utter the word or tell the story. It will never be real if we do not say it.

This fiction exists only in the imagination of two particularly stubborn people. You have kissed me a thousand times over, and I have held you countless times, too. We have done this from afar, and we have done this with finesse, with grace, and without anyone catching on. Now, it is time for me to leave. Now, it is time for you to go. Nothing was said, so nothing happened. As long as we uphold the vow and never talk about it, as long as we never say the word, it will never have existed. And yet, I will always remember you, and I hope you will remember me, too.

This piece was first seen on The Soaring Twenties Social Club (STSC) as part of an addendum to the Symposium on Fiction, the deadline for which passed me by like most love has passed me by: without my realisation, like a swift yet furtive cat, like a confession never uttered.

Walking through, below and around the marvels of a world far gone, of genius left behind, of greatness, succumbed to the lashes of time, it occurred to me that only to see these places with my own eyes was once a dream. Has it come true? I do not know. Dreams do not come true; they only disappear and get folded into reality. Dreams only exist until you cannot differentiate them very well from reality. From that point on, it is but life. Unlike our days or the rest of our existence, dreams do not have a moment where they are happening. They instantly become memories. In the precise moment you achieve whatever you dreamt of, you begin missing the yearning, the want, the hours and days you spent thinking of what would happen if it ever came true.

My dreams have come true, but at what cost, for I have lost them. One might say it is a blessed life, for much of what I dreamt of not more than a decade ago has already begun to happen. And they will be correct. But they will not know how burning too fast through that list has its challenges. You cannot dream as quickly, and suddenly, you find yourself in a life with a dearth of the impossible. As I sit here, having become who I always wanted to be, it occurs to me the truest dream is the one that can never come true.

Writing the first book takes you a lifetime, but writing the second takes you a deadline. That is how dreams work, too. The first few that come true simmered for years, maybe even since you were not as privy to the world’s ways. Then, you learn how to dream, and therein lies the problem.

I continue dreaming, but all my dreams are curtailed to fit within the curtains of reality. The more dreams come true, the more realistic the others begin. No longer do I dream of pink skies, for I know they cannot exist. Instead, I dream of a day not too far from the one I have right now. I dream of love, but not an impossible, colourful one, just the one that will stay by my side for the longest possible time. No longer do I dream of the unreal.

Grateful as I am for all the gifts I’ve received, I wish I could dream of impossibilities again, but I cannot; I do not know how anymore.

Time has marred and blemished it all.

This piece was first seen on The Soaring Twenties Social Club (STSC) as part of an addendum to the Symposium on Dreams, which I had missed because (and fittingly so) I was walking around in one of mine.

I lie down on the blue lounger in absolute comfort at the end of a long day, thinking about it all once again—this life, the days, of how despite these comforts, every day is long and stretches into midnight and is muddied like watercolours being mixed on a plastic palette. The day is as long as I have known any day to be. I read a few poems and watch the sky flicker with lightning in the distance. They triggered a storm warning yesterday, and all of us braced ourselves. Winds of sixty, seventy kilometres per hour, gusting up to eighty, the message warned. The storm dropped in the middle of the day. The dark, looming cloud over the valley cried pearls of hail. For some time, everything was quiet.

Nothing but the murmur of the rain existed for a while. We remained cooped up as we are on most afternoons. Most people did what they would do anyway, albeit with some pauses. Many windows were opened, I believe, to get a moment of respite, and dogs whimpered away into corners only they knew of. Then, the rain stopped, and out we went like clockwork. Nothing ever stops in this world. People always have places to be, things to do, and errands to run. I went to the mall to get some things, and it was as crowded as always—cafe after cafe and pub after pub filled with people. The grocery store checkout still queued into a deadlock, and tired workers stood pressing the same screen, opening the same drawers, counting the same cash and swiping the same cards.

Nothing stops our will for the mundane. The real adventure is the struggle to find a cab or a dilapidated rickshaw. Everything else is a scam, snake oil, and dreams sold as if they are any better than what most people already live. A person on a coffee run has more purpose than a hippie meditating on some mountain. The people who fall through the cracks pretend they have the answer to a question that does not exist. Most people only wait for the rain to stop. Then, they quietly go out and about their business. It is the most purpose anyone ever needs—to leave the house and know where you’re going. I lie on the lounger, tired. But tired as I am, I would not replace a single day in this life.

A plant in my apartment has suddenly outgrown its pot by a wide margin. Its stems have made almost a truss bridge to ensure the leaves closest to the window and its light stay upright. Yes, I plan to move it to a larger pot soon, but something in witnessing something become exceptional has me putting off this mundane task. There is beauty in overreaching, so for now, there it is, partially suspended in midair, and here I am, watching it. Perhaps, my love for this irrelevant moment comes from the fact that I, too, have overreached for a little bit, and for a little while, I was glorious, too. Now, I try what I can try and do not go beyond my bounds so much. The plant reminds me of some parts of my life. It is a photograph that was never clicked. It is a chronicle that was never written. I plan to savour the visual for as long as I feasibly can, but then, I will give it support, change the pot, and tie some of its branches with some twine. I will not let it fall freely under the weight of its own accolades; no, I will allow a graceful regression for it—one that I did not get when I did fly for a second or two.

It baffles me that if you look closely, there are journeys all around. Lately, finally, I have found myself looking outside of myself once again. I have looked at the world like I did until some months ago. People are often too preoccupied with themselves, and if not themselves, then others, or the general idea of a person, of society, but we ought to see more. The world warrants we look more and talk less. Some things continue to happen despite our meddlesome nature. A whole world exists outside the world of people; if any joy truly exists, it exists in that world. Not in this make-believe, this stage play we conduct every day of relationships, of little scuffles and trysts with paperwork and government offices, of delayed parcels and broken hearts and unsent letters, of clients and projects and appraisals, of all the shenanigans we have created to keep ourselves busy. There is little value in all of that. The flower growing spontaneously on the sidewalk has more to say than any one of us can ever fathom.

Woke up before my alarm and decided to lie in bed for a little bit. Thought of all the times I had thought I could bend life per plan and smiled a little at the long list of times I had failed. There was a craving for coffee at this point, so I got up and made a cup, and put the cup beside the bed on the marble coaster. Dozed off for a little while and waltzed into a dream of the impossible again, only to wake up and realise the music was still playing. Turned the speaker louder and got out of bed, and sipped the coffee that had gone cold. Sat at the desk and replied to some messages. But no mention, no thought of writing until then.

Last year was a year full of writing, and it had little place for life. This one is not. This one has me putting off my words for others, time and time again. That is the long and the short of it. As for how I feel about it—it is not anyone’s concern.

But it is worth a thought, and so, I wondered what was different, and of course, it was that I had a job once again and a life once again. The very thing I advocate, the sun around which all my words revolve, is now, once again, eating at it. To live, to be a part of the world once again has left little time to write about it. I do not haggle with the good and bad of things, so I do not know how much of any this is, but there is little control I have over it anyway, now that I am in it.

I look at the Pessoa beside me and the Carver at the lounger behind. What would they think? I do not know. I have no goddamn idea what they would think. But I can do little when no plan works in this life anyway. You set a few ground rules, and then you watch it go as it goes, over and over and over.

Sat to write for a little while without a plan for where things will go. Reached the last line in time to begin working for the day. There is little else to say about anything else. My notes stay with me, and my memory is roughly reliable when it comes to the myriad of things that happen in life. I can always find time to write about the things I do not have time to write about right now.

All around the planet, in every home is the same lament when it comes to how things could be. Things could be harder, sure, but they could be easier, too. And that’s the long and the short of it. And then, everyone talks about something else or doesn’t talk about anything for a minute or two, but they all agree and sigh. Surely, things could be easier, too, they all think in unison. All over, this happens day after day. There is little we can do about it but carry on—with conversation and with life.

It rained till the morning today. How do I know this? Because I was up working on something as usual. My obsession is as unpredictable as my disposition, but a rainy morning mobilises them both. The morning reminded me of my dream from the other day: I woke up at five, but the air was too muggy. It was sunny outside when I did, but it did not sit right by me since I knew it was five in the morning. How did I know that? How I know it is inching towards midnight as I write these words. All of us have a sense of time. The whole schtick is to feel time pass.

I noticed there was no power in the apartment. I walked to the circuit board and pulled its door open. Inactive. I walked to the balcony, searching for electricity—in the flats all around, on the streets in the distance, on the lone bulb hanging outside the tin shed nearby. Nothing. The world was suddenly out of power. At first glance, though, it looked the same. Only now, suddenly and almost in one fell swoop, there was useless clutter around me. In one moment, everything was redundant and had no reason to exist. Of course, with the ridiculousness of it all, I could sense it was a dream. But for a second, I was convinced of the pointlessness.

Since then, it has set in me: the burst of futility. Like a stain you cannot fully wash out of a suit you once wore at someone’s wedding, like the hindsight-induced regret of a childhood long gone, like a broken vow, like the countless decisions that could have gone either way, like the thousand times we’ve talked about things, of how they could be harder, sure, but they could be easier, too; like the sigh that follows after.

This is a world of advertisement and commodification. It is not enough to do something; you must also advertise it the best you can. The cameras should constantly be rolling. Sipping coffee is not a complete act in itself; you must also film it, you must film the banalest, the most normal things people do, and you must take obscene ownership of that. No one before you has sipped coffee from that point on. Now, you are the poster child for this activity people have done for more days than the number of beats your heart will ever take. No, you now have ownership of this, and not just this, because you now know that this is what it is all about; you can now take anything, such as running or even writing. It is not essential to write, no. You must make a video of it all, with all the bells and whistles that most writers don’t have or, better, don’t need, such as a candle or two, or writing with a view. Most writers write. Those who don’t write tell others they write. Most life is lived quietly. That is true for most of the world. It is lived by going through the motions, by remembering things.

But this world is not about most people, no. It is the world of a select few, of those who are the loudest with the least to show for it, but the inventory is rarely done. Of course, my qualms with it come from the fact that it is a world I do not fit in. Not anymore. Not with my want for genuine honesty in all of everything. I am honest enough to admit it. I do not believe there is merit in documenting or recording every living, breathing moment. What is living then? Internalising it. Living is a profoundly personal activity, and sometimes, you tell other people things.

Living and recording are not words that share meaning. But language is seldom about meaning, of course. It is always about usage. If living has a different meaning now, however, I pronounce most of us dead. This is the afterlife. Despite the good we did, we somehow ended up in hell.

I go to the store to buy some clothes. I pick out three or four things. I walk to the checkout counter. Whoever I’m with—a friend, my mother, my brother—asks me if I want to try out some more, that it was a quick decision, that they have time if I want to look around more, that the green one over there in the corner might look excellent. I softly tell them that I have made up my mind. If I try something else now, it will make it harder, not easier, to decide. Many view this as stubbornness, but no one knows my indecisiveness better than I do. The faux precision with which I cut a decision out of my life, the surgical slice is only an after-effect of my wavering resolve, the doubt in everything I do.

How you do one thing, after all, is how you do everything. No one will admit this, but that does not make it untrue. The way you order at a restaurant is how you seek love, and if you dillydally over deciding what paint to use on your wall, you will delay taking up a job. I avoid my nature in practice. I starve myself of the time to decide; thus, I decide. Whether a decision is correct is not up to me; hindsight gifts decisions their merit. But when I have thought enough and thought hard, I am not willing to think any further. The regular at a cafe always orders the same thing—this tells you more about them than anything they could ever tell you on their own. Baristas and bartenders often know us better than our closest confidants.

But when it comes to the pointlessness we call life, most conversations end, frustratingly so, at one question: what is it that you need?

I need a bench, and I need some books, and I need to be left alone with the time and the patience to read them. That is the only thing I need; it is not what I want, however. I have spent too long deciding what I want; now, the possibilities are endless. And now, I want it all. I want to be a part of the world, help make it move, and avoid sitting on the outskirts of this city of life. Now, I have wasted time deciding. All my life is now an attempt to decide what it will be about, and if I know something about the irresolute, it is that we are always on the fence.

In the top drawer of a dusty mahogany desk covered with sunlight and a plethora of unwritten drafts and mundane paperwork lie hundreds of letters I never sent. Where did they come from, then? From regret, of course, where else? They come from all the times I could have said something other than the right thing, for once, even once would have sufficed, but everything must be in its right place, and now, the words are stuck without a recipient, without stamps, without any purpose. But they linger. Yes, they continue lingering in some corner of my mind, floating about like little birds learning to fly diligently but not knowing what to do once they figure it out. They say we must always say things than not, so they do not weigh on us, that keeping it to ourselves, locked in our heart, makes it heavier than it needs to be, but for how long does one carry the weight until they forget it is weight they carry?

I take the pile out, and some stragglers, which were never bundled, and I toss them onto the desk with a thump. Then, I begin sifting through names I no longer recognise and addresses I no longer remember. One by one, I tear open the flaps, and out come pages, yellow and old, filled with rambling confessions. The ink has blotted on many; I cannot make sense of them anymore, but I know they carried something vital with them. Lost as their contents may be, their weight is not lost on me. All my honesty is reduced to unuttered, unshared reservations. Now, I sit here by myself, a second cup of coffee before ten, imagining how it would feel if they did exist and if it would change anything. And then, I think of what I want to be changed, and I cannot figure it out. All this has been a futile exercise.

Once again, I vow to myself to say what I want to say at all times, always. Once again, I am aware this will not happen. Some of us keep most of us to ourselves. We go about saying the right things, correct answers to questions no one asks, living with our heads held high for having done it properly. Done what? Living. But then, why do we carry the sawdust, the parts we stripped away? How could I ever tell you?

To be alive is to be passed around like a coin between places, to stay for a little while as a coin often finds home in a pocket or wallet. Then, when the time comes: to leave. No one can stay anywhere forever, but of course, all coins eventually get forgotten in a drawer, and people call someplace their home. This is what makes it all meaningful, after all. We walk from one place to another in search of one we would never walk away from, no matter what promises are given to us. I do not fear many things, but I do fear never being able to find such a place, to be stuck in the middle of it forevermore.

I fear obsolescence—becoming so redundant to the lives of others, to every place I have ever set foot in that my presence or absence makes no difference whatsoever. I fear touching so many lives, but it always being touch and go, never being an afterthought because I was a little too occupied with things the others could not care much about, a bit too much of who I am, and I become. I fear starring in a couple of stories everyone remembers but not their narrative. Like a character written out because he did not fit too well in any part of where the story was going, left with a forcibly resolved arc around the halfway mark as the others embark towards the end of the tale. Of course, it is natural to be afraid of something. Worry is an instinct.

As I sip my coffee, I tell myself this, watching the day get on like I have before a thousand times over. Cliche as it may be: we all want to belong somewhere, eventually. It is what defines the wandering. It has to come to an end, or else you may as well never move; you may stay put, never try your hand at a new place, at new people. Perhaps, that is what scares me the most: wandering forever. For all my preference for walking towards nowhere in particular, I, too, wish there was a milestone in sight sometimes. Today is such a day. Yesterday was a day like this, too. The day before that wasn’t so far apart from them either. I have walked far too long as instructed. I have passed so many people by; I have lost count. The road stretches on. There is nothing in sight still.

A single picture of a tree is just that—a picture. A thousand pictures of trees, on different days, in different seasons is a collection. It says more than what one picture ever will. It takes a life of its own. When does this begin to happen? At two pictures? At ten? Who knows? But it does happen. That is what a body of work means. It is also why I write my words day after day. A piece on its own says something, sometimes, but all of them together, they say more than any one of them ever can. What do they say? I am not the judge of that. It will be up to scrutiny later, much later. Perhaps, never, too. Who knows? Who knows how things turn out? But they do say something. That, I am sure of, and that is all my intention: for these inquiries to coalesce into a whole, I could never have created at once. I have fooled myself into writing more than I ever set out to do and hidden in there somewhere, under the folds of sentences filled with things said casually, I may have said something worth saying. At least, I hope so.

But why can’t I say it for sure? Because I cannot say anything for certain. All things I have been sure of have shown me how wrong I have been. In any case, you do not know what happens to your art, and I hope no one is alive to learn what people think they have to say about anything in the world. All great painters end up being printed on a mug, and all great writers are quoted on a T-shirt. That is all there is to it. The artist’s fate is either fading into obscurity or dilution; there is no in-between. They all end this way, even the good ones, especially the good ones. How can we be sure, then? We can’t. Why make art, then? Why not? Fire was a gift to humanity given by chance, and it still is a gift. Its use is a different question—to wage war, to raze forests, to inspire and instigate, to keep warm, or to manhandle and neglect. When the universe does not interfere, I wonder what authority does the artist have?

I sit down to write in gaps between whatever qualifies as a task. But this, this is not a task. These words are not a task. I am now realising, once again, something that I already know and have known for a long time—that all my life is but a bridge to this desk. I wish I had the privilege of being so hopeless that I had nothing to lose or the riches to not care about something as perverse as a to-do list, but I am neither here nor there. I am not in the sky, and I am not on the ground. I am somewhere in the middle.

That means I will always live two lives until my fortune takes a turn, for the literal better or worse. I will be suspended like a bug on a wire, crossing, not knowing where to, aloof about where from, only crawling as if my life depended on it. To be in the middle is to drive through the old neighbourhood and occasionally walk through it to visit the remnants of the life you were never destined for, that you spent years building a ship to sail away from. It is never being able to fully leave it either. To be in the middle is to spend your days drenched in the blessings you never had, yet worry over how it will never be enough. Mostly, however, it means that every word I ever write will have an echo. I will always write it while looking at my watch, and I will always live my life, the one that feeds into this mulchy broth of words I stir day in and day out, with the guilt of knowing I have not written yet, or written enough, or written any better than I did the day before. The last one will hurt like a second-degree burn on the palm of my hand, but I will keep writing, hands flying over the keys whenever I get the time.

And I will tell myself: it is all good as long as I have written, that I should keep climbing uphill, and that there is only one life. Yes, I believe that is the problem. There is only one life, but one too many fires to put out And between jumping out the window, running from the flames and being grateful to have made it on my feet, I will be able to write a few words sometimes. I better make it so even a second is enough.

A second will have to do. After all, there are things, too.

I woke up early today, much before most of the town even begins to move. With a coffee in my hand, I stood on the grass, still moist from last night’s rain, and then I walked back inside and sat at the desk with no words to write. The quiet hour was all I wanted. Well, as quiet as quiet can be. The ceiling fan added its piece to the background, and the birds had some urgent information to broadcast. Just then, my need to talk things through with people to arrive at many, often erroneous, conclusions stared at me from some corner of the silent room.

I wonder if it was the exhaustion from the lack of sleep or just a moment when we walk too far into the depths of our minds, unknowingly, like how we often walk around someone else’s house, partly out of curiosity and partly due to not knowing where things are, that I thought about my life in this city. Not my entire life, no, but just this bit, this leg of it.

Three years have passed since I came back to the city. For all intents and purposes, this is where I live now. I tell myself I will move out again, find a new place in a new city in some corner of the country or even outside. Yes, it can happen, but it will not happen anytime soon, and I have no plans to even begin planning such a move. For now, I carry this feeling of temporariness with me like I have been carrying a parcel in my bag, with a present for a friend, intending to ship it day after day, and always failing to do so.

It is only today, groggy, having slept about four hours at night, that I found my conscience pliable enough to internalise this—that I live here now. But then, in my heart is a potent homesickness. Why?

Perhaps, it is the possibility that I miss, that things have gone a certain way already, and that they can never be how they could have been. In what way? Not in some grand chasm of difference, but the tiny, little things. A habit or quirk that is now absent from my life, which I do not even know about since I will never have it!

There is a damning permanence that comes along with time. It eats away at you, like the scratch behind your throat after getting drenched on a rainy day.

I have a reputation for getting things done. I do not know where this reputation got formed, or why, or even how low the bar has been for people doing things that I, a person who dares to take a nap when there is still work to do, have amassed such a reputation. But then, people often misplace their trust and value how things appear, not how things are. For all nine or ten things I do every day, I have a thousand things left undone. For all books I do find the time to read, my apartment is littered with unread ones, waiting to be picked up once again; the bookmarks have been on the same page for so long you can see the soft bruises they have caused. In my heart, there is a want to do nothing. I believe it is the same for everyone else, but I manage to feign productivity. That much is to my credit. That I can take a bow for.

I jump at the first excuse to leave things for tomorrow, the next month, or, often, the following year. Every single thing I have done, I have done tardily. I am shocked at just how much I was able to do still, just how much I can do all day long, only by being painstakingly average. I make just the amount of effort that is necessary; no other, no more.

I only have unintelligibly ginormous undertakings; my effort is meagre and small in comparison. There is a permanent paucity of motivation in me. I am perpetually fighting an uphill battle, begging myself to get on my feet, imploring my hands to move. All these words I write, those I have written so far, result from continual coercion. My life is a side-effect of dreaming too big and falling short, and now that I think of it, so is my reputation for being productive, whatever that means. It is all just a result of looking at something I know in my heart is impossible and then proclaiming I will find a way. This is not courageous. This is dimwitted. All of who I am is a repercussion of my naivety and my unwillingness to wrap my head around the limits of time.

I reckon if there are no deadlines and your goals are as vague as your claims and estimates as roundabout as your metaphors, you can get away with doing almost everything you planned to do.

I sit in a car with my parents, and we talk about how the weather is just not right this year, of how it is the beginning of May, but it has rained as if it were July already. I wake up the next day to find a message from a friend on a group chat saying it does not seem like May. I get out of bed a little while later. The usual morning routine ensues—I settle by the window, in my chair with a cup of coffee and the curtains pulled wide open. It is still raining outside as if it wasn’t enough the previous day. Not that I have anything against weather like this; in fact, I enjoy it very much, but again, my desire to have everything in its proper place gets the better of me. I let my thoughts rebel against the aesthetic of the world.

But then, it occurs to me if all of us are wrong. Out of everything I trust in this life, I trust my memory the least. There is a reason for my lists and notes and calendars that are always up to date with the minutiae of my days. I spend the better part of the morning reading up on the history of weather in the city, looking at old weather reports from years ago, countless tables and data and terms I do not understand. I go back decades, and I realise we have all been very wrong indeed. It has always been this way. We have always welcomed May with the rain.

How did we forget, then? How we forget anything. Between the bills, the exhaustion, and the want for simpler times in a world that continues to change rapidly, how can you remember anything is, perhaps, a better question to ask.

Living seems harder as the days go by and the world gets on with its antics and shenanigans. Many people I happen to talk to about the state of the world have a lot to say about it. They say it is a pattern, that things inevitably repeat, and society always moves in cycles. Some say it is the dawn of a new, complex age heralded by the advent of all this technology.

But there are others, like me, my parents, my friends, the baristas in the cafes I frequent, or the cab drivers all over town, who, when facing the insurmountable odds of living in this day and age, say, “Surely, it must be the weather.”

Why don’t I believe in god? For the same reason, I don’t believe in love. I have spent many months, many years with a dustpan and a broom. I have picked the pieces of my life over and over again. I have spent days waiting for miracles, and in the end, I have realised only I brought them about. Nothing happened until I took things into my own hands. All the credit that there is belongs to these very hands. Neither god nor lover stopped to lend one.

And why don’t I believe in love? Same reason I don’t believe in god. Because they peddle it as selfless devotion, and some of us learn much about selflessness, of how it eats at you, how it destroys and how it corrupts. For every pious saint the world has to offer, there are twice as many fanatical zealots. For every heartfelt story of lovers, there are more tragedies than there are flowers.

Bold love leads to promises no one can feasibly keep, words used irresponsibly in the heat of the moment, and bold faith leads to helpless people who know only to rely on the crutch of their religion, who, for all talk of sin and penance suffer no consequences for their actions. They pray to their gods but barely manage to land their trash in a bin. It is the only thing one can say about religion and responsibility. They claim fealty but only till it smells of roses, but time passes, and flowers wilt out of negligence. It is the only thing one can say about love and affection.

I have never really had an agreement with god or religion, and I am an apostate of love—at least, the flavour of it with selflessness and sacrifice and patience and humility. It is an error made a bit too frequently to dehumanise the person you love, to make them into some infallible deity. It is an error in the human way. We know only to worship. The only question that remains is what.

I have known all too well that the gods, if they ever existed outside myths and stories, left long ago. And love? Well, love is just religion where you watch your gods leave.

I would rather build a monument of memory. I would instead worship my own tenacity.

There is not an ounce of selflessness left in me.

In my mind is an elaborate city with twists and turns and winding streets with corner shops and benches. Often, I walk into some alley I do not know my way out of. I am lost for a bit. Then, I am found, but I must walk–sometimes, for days on end. On one such walk today on this ominous, cloudy and almost confusing evening, I am again at the coffee shop. I say hello to the barista and ask how he’s doing and if his fever is any better. He tells me not entirely, no, and then, he tells me how it is only up to him to manage the cafe and how short-staffed they are. I tell him I figured it since I always see him, and I understand the toll it may take on him. I do this with the most earnest tone I can use.

When the inky, almost pitch-black coffee arrives, I face it and sit in utter silence. No one has told me what I have wanted to hear, and even if they did, they did not do it earnestly. To hold the ship, to hold my ground, and to continue to exist. It tires me, but what else can I do? There is no answer. April began so long ago. I look around; it is still April.

The language of the city surrounds me: the honking, the sirens, the occasional vocal obscenity thrown into the air for all to hear, the roaring of the engines and the silence of the people too tired of being tired. I find a moment of solace in the meaningless sounds of the world. Somehow, I am reminded I am still here. Does noise exist if no one sits and listens to it, even reluctantly, or perhaps, like me, of their own accord? Does all the good in my life exist if I have no one to tell it to? I can exclaim with joy alone, but is it exclamation if no one hears it?

Questions, questions, I can sit here and ponder as much as I can. I push the cup of coffee forward and put my head down on the table. A minute passes, and I feel the cold wind on my face. It appears it will rain again.

On my walk today, I asked myself, almost spontaneously, did I get this life because I am the way I am or am I who I am because of this life? Of course, like all great questions, I did not have an answer to it. Not right now, no. Questions that are truly worth asking do not have their answers readily available. It does not mean they should not be asked. Quite the contrary, they should be asked, and then, they should be given the space to blossom into some sort of response, like the flowers of spring blossom in their due time.

I dreamt of a wishing well the other day—made from the cleanest work of masonry I have ever seen. I do not know the park in the dream, but I do know the place which should have been there instead of the park. Waiting for my turn, I sat on the steps of a gazebo nearby and finally got up to walk up to the well when I saw a window. Facing the well, I put my hands in my pockets, and they were full of pennies or whatever coin they were. It was a dream, and I did not inspect them, and even if I had, I do not recall. The memory would have fallen between the gaps between sleep and wakefulness. But there was a problem. As much as I had all the pennies I could have ever needed, I did not have wishes.

I tried to think of one, but after wasting a good few minutes in front of the well, I walked away deeper into the garden on a walk to nowhere. I do not remember much about that dream from that point on, which is natural, and I am not one for the hullabaloo of the meanings of our dreams. Some mystic tells people what they want to hear in exchange for some money. That is all there is to it. I am not a man who thinks in superstitions.

I only found it curious, almost ridiculous. That is how most things are in life: curiosities.

What anything means, what the answer is to something, I wish I knew. All I know is it was one of the most comical situations I have ever found myself in, and my only regret is that it was in a dream. In reality, for every penny I do have, I have a thousand wishes, maybe more.

Probably, a thousand more.

For three nights in a row, I have stood and watched the rain. The city stands still in the face of the endless downpour, the ferocious lightning, the unencumbered winds, even animals have scurried and hidden themselves, and birds and bats caught in the middle of the chaos have floated helplessly across the blurry panorama of the torrential night sky. But I have stood, in the safety of this seventh-floor balcony, on grass that has felt real as the water has run through it. I have stood and watched and found great joy in this havoc ahead of me. Perhaps, it was the luxury of shelter; maybe, eventually, some of us begin looking forward to a storm. I do not know what it is, but I have enjoyed this cataclysmic shift from clear skies and golden afternoons to a blurry visage of the city caught under the rain. Three nights in a row, this has happened, and it has rejuvenated me, these words, and all my joy.

Just now, as I stretched back after writing the passage above, I leaned to open the balcony door. Like how children wait for the ice cream truck, I await the storm. Just now, a cloud rumbled ever-so-softly, and the ominous chill in the air settled inside this room. There is no more time to write. I must prepare my cup of chamomile before the power goes out, before the gale gets whipped, before everything ceases and bows in front of the wild tempest. It baffles me, my excitement for this. I do not know what to make of it. But if someone asked me what I remember from this year, I would say I remember the early summer rains. I would say I remember the cups of chamomile and how all of what the day stood for was washed up in the blink of an eye. Perhaps, it is the impermanence that has its hold on me. Or perhaps, it is something else I do not yet know. I have always been of a fickle mind, changing abruptly without notice, rhyme or reason.

I walk into a cafe. It does not matter where I do this, for the city rarely dictates what a cafe looks like. I am greeted by angular lines and a slaty interior, usually. The vases are brutalist stacks of engineered wood if they are geometric. Or they are glossy, ivory white marble or ceramic if they are curvaceous. But regardless of their shape or material, they house some species of parlour palm. A counter is adjacent to some wall—it does not matter which one; behind it, people scramble in the tiny space they have to fulfil orders. On the walls, some doodle is painted in an intentionally crude fashion, or there is some contemporary art on canvas panels, usually triplets. The menu is as uninspired as the ambience: echoing the same dishes and drinks.

I read a poem that reads the same as another poem I hated—with abrupt spacing and intentional profanity, which serves no purpose but to ensure that the poem appears honest. They call it the free verse; they insult what free means. How free is something that uses the same rules as something else? But again, what do I know of poetry? All I can write is prose nobody reads. I watch a film, and rarely does it spark something within me. The rest get forgotten as soon as I walk out of the theatre if there is a theatre. I go to a bar in another country; it looks precisely like the one in my neighbourhood, and more so, it serves the same cocktails.

There is no invention unless you are some snob in high society, reinventing something already existent and rebranding it to fit your image. Even the advice we get sounds the same; all philosophy may as well regurgitate what came before. Inspiration is dead. These words, here, are but a eulogy.

Who killed it? We did. But not instantly, no.

We choked it slowly, deliberately, and now, the lifeless corpses of cafes and bars and pubs and apartments and art and music and poetry and literature and philosophy stare at us wherever we go. All urban life is a ghoulish reminder of all urban life. We now live in a graveyard, sipping our poisons, humming to a song we do not know the name of.

After all, who could tell the difference?

This piece is part of the Soaring Twenties Social Club Symposium for May 2023. The theme is Death.