Turning 24

Akaky looks at himself in the mirror as he puts on his favourite denim shirt and brown pants.  His eyes see not a 24-year-old man, but rather a five-year-old child wearing his father's over-sized clothes.  The beard of a week or two, scraggly and still a little patchy underneath the chin, seems out of place on a face that would otherwise seem as childish as befits the man wearing his clothes.  His hair is a mess of Brylcream and the unwashed gunk of the last three days.  He's recovering from a fever that caused him to almost go into delirium and his face looks wan and his already small and deep-set eyes look even more like they're peeking out between the overhang of the forehead and the high cheek bones.

Somehow there's something that doesn't quite feel very adult about him.  Maybe it's the shirt hanging loose off his shoulders, maybe it's that the pants look loose on his waist as he tries to hold them up at waist length with his hands in his pockets.  It could also be the patchy beard, which if shaved, would reveal a naive face, too pale and white for his nationality.

Akaky looks at himself and he can't help smiling that wry smile of his.  The smile that is perhaps the most incongruous but also the most indelible part of him.  Though he looks childish to himself beneath the trappings, the smile is that of a wizened old man.  A tough old bird who's smoked Camel unfiltered's all his life so his voice is like gravel in a tin can.  Such an old man's smile, exuding sarcasm and a kind of rugged realism about life.  That smile, along with the wrinkles on his forehead, the ever-deepening wrinkles and the few grey hairs that threaten to become the many grey hairs.  All of this... perhaps, these ephemera are what make Akaky 24 years old today.  Perhaps this is the trick to aging.  With each year, another wrinkle, another shock of grey hair, another notch of sarcasm and unshakeable coarseness.

The portrait of the artist as a ... man.

The Creative Process

I wonder whether one needs to make up an entire story, from head to toe, for it to be deemed fiction. Why not just dye the hair, give it a nosejob, and a facial, paint the nails and put some make up on reality? Doesn't that qualify as fiction too?

If it does qualify as fiction, then I suppose all the stories we tell of our own lives are fictitious. As we repeat the same story over and over again, — the one about escaping from a crazed subway mugger, or the one about the time I got so drunk that I ended up kicking a vending machine open, — every single time... we add new details, change emotions, change the whole grand scope of the event.

Doesn't that qualify as fiction? Isn't that creative? Because if it is, then everything I've written here is fiction, and if it isn't, then nothing here is creative.

With taste

Ignore me if you must, mon cher. Never pick up when I call you; don't respond to my letters; avoid me in person. It seems that you must ruin our friendship of ten years, just to ... for what? What could your motive be?

Ignore me, if you must, mon cher. It must bring you some joy, some secret pleasure in thinking of my suffering, perhaps not thinking of my suffering. You must be so oblivious to others' feelings that I must not rise to the level of consciousness within your being. I must be simply non-existent in your mind.

Ignore me, if you must, mon cher. Pretend that you did not tempt my foolish heart with sweet nothings, with goodbyes of 'Ciao bello!' Pretend that you did not once ask me to move in prematurely. Pretend that it is all nothing. Perhaps some years down the line, you will pretend also that you did not kiss me as you held my hand in a dark theater, as your dark musk enveloped my soul, and I, for a moment, rejoiced in something that was never to be.

Ignore me, if you must, mon cher. Ignore me, indeed, but do it with some taste, for the way you do it now is really rather ugly.

To T.S. (2009)

O love, what love burns in my heart!
A love that dares not speak out loud its own name for fear of
Hurting those wonderful bejewelled ears;
A love so tender that it pains,
Pains my heart so to see your
Red lips and not kiss them;
A love that wants naught to hear
But your voice say to me,
“I want you” (or even “Hi.”)

O ye gods! What have I done?
What torture have I inflicted
On another that I should
Thus be tortured too! —
Pierced by the arrows of Eros
Have I been that not a moment goes by without my thoughts
Are not filled by that wondrous,
Kind, beautiful face!

O love, my dear — release me,
Forever release with cruel,
Hurting words, that my heart
May die to become stone!
May I feel no more the pangs
Of such a passion;
May I love no more, no!
Not another one should enter
My heart as you have!
Speak cruelly, my dear;
Clip the wings of Cupid
That he dare fly not.
O release me my love, that
None, no! — a name
Not yours shall ever enter
My poor heart. Yet do — release me,
For I know that you love me not
Nor regard this poor beating bloody heart of mine.

Waiting

He waited. He had waited for days now, for weeks. He waited again and again and again in the false hope that he would call. He didn't call: not in seconds, minutes, hours, days or weeks. Of course his waiting hadn't been passive. He tried, more than once, to call him, but without effect.

What was he waiting for? What was he expecting would happen? That there could be any point was something only a madman would believe. Of course, for some time now he'd been doubting his own sanity. So what then? "It's beyond all reason," he would say aloud to himself when there was no one around to hear; he said the same thing in his mind when there were others to hear so that they wouldn't hear.

Waiting made him a victim: he loved that — he hated that. Maybe he wasn't a victim. Maybe he was just a ****ing a*****e.

Terror

He knew that he was wasting his time, surfing the internet, and looking at the Facebook pages and photographs of people he had never met, nor would ever meet. He had many more important things to do, like his graduate school applications, or reading for pleasure and intellectual development. But he liked doing this more; he felt as though he were learning a lot more by getting glimpses of humanity at its boring everyday, at birthdays, games, get-togethers, where people felt the need to record the memory of a fleeting moment for all time yet to come.

He was learning what it was like to be a human being. This was a lesson he felt he really needed to learn, since he'd lost touch with his own humanness along the way. It is puzzling that losing one's own humanity is possible. After all, in the Sanskrit verse, "humanness is what comes of being human, as cowness comes of being a cow." So how could he have ever lost it, his "ownmostness"? But such was the mystery that had crept into his mind of late. He didn't feel as though he were himself; he didn't feel as though he were anyone. He had become empty, an empty coffee cup at the diner, waiting to be filled by the pretty waitress who was really an actress.

What filled that cup more than anything was terror and fear. He had only seen this kind of terror in another person; he was much older, and by any measure someone who'd failed to make use of the opportunities given to him. But now he had begun to experience it himself. Terror because he didn't know where he was going; terror because there was nothing before his mind. This must be the feeling of convicts at the gallows or the chair, right before the trap door opened and the neck broke painfully, or right before the switch was flipped and one was fried in an oilless pan. It must also be the feeling of those set afloat on canoes in exile as they had nothing but a hostile crowd behind them and terrifying infinity and emptiness before them.

Terror. This is what defined his life now, a formless force.