NayaNayanaNanaya

Born on a dry afternoon, born to parents who had sighed sadly upon knowing of his existence, the yellow sickly baby named Lizarel opened his eyes to a world that seemed determined to be dark, harsh and uncaring. His mother, having done her duty pushing him out of her, wiped off most of him, put him on some straw and let him cry himself to calm. She was busy and she had to think about other more important things and nothing was too young to learn what life it was born to. She still had a long day’s work before her, there was more than half a field of corn that needed plucking and cleaning before the day’s end and she couldn’t afford to sit with her last mistake and actually help it grow. Now that it was out, it would need to learn to do something useful around here, and at its stage, it was useful just being by itself. Her first born, a big lumbering girl of 16 years was delegated to Lizarel’s care and the upkeep of the house and so in between her never-ending tasks that she did in her big slow way, whenever she deigned to remember, she would turn to gaze upon his ashen face. If she chose to strain herself at that moment, she would sometimes hear the pitiful noises of distress he made in his fitful sleep. His father, working in their small fields, had taken his evening bottle with him that morning. This seemed an especially cruel day to him. The high sun mocked him, he thought, glaring spitefully at the crops that it helped grow and he spent the day thus plotting nefarious ends for the lives of the farming family that depended upon him and cursed the rest of the natural world for being in his way. 

Here, among his own people, there were many that did not think he would last the week. They perhaps even wished it upon the poor baby. Yet unfortunately, in all the manifold and mysterious ways that Lizarel managed to disappoint everyone who met him, there was one way that he did not meet their expectations. However sickly and under-fed as he was, Lizarel did not quietly waste away. He clung to life, grasping at it with his always filthy hands, stuffing inside him any half-coin of nourishment and growth, quickly lest it be taken away from him, and so beggaring his existence from his surroundings, over the harsh, hard years, he scraped and grew into this brittle-thin unhappy boy.

Lizarel, born to such conditions could hardly consider himself lucky or even blessed, because he felt the whole world to be against him. Not even a cheery disposition could have saved him from his hyperbolic morbidity, never mind a song in his heart. But far from cheery, he was all too conscious of not being wanted, he grew up moody and taciturn, and from the start, in lieu of seeking friendships, sought power and fights and seemed to have some talent for picking precisely the ones he shouldn’t, because he lost all of them. He was stubborn in his desire to not learn anything from them so as to spite those that wanted to do anything to him. So in a fit of impotent anger he would go off, right in the heat of one unsatisfactory encounter with someone, to find and tick off another who could want to fight him. It almost seemed as if he genuinely wished for these fights. He was, if it needed saying, unloved by anyone who met him. They would not deign to tolerate his presence enough to build up even that most basic of foundations needed in order to construct the lofty heights of compassion and affection between two people. And because nobody offered him any kindness, he never learnt how to make that soft, sweet feeling within himself and could offer nothing to anyone but his starved and battle-thinned fists. 

And so it was that Lizarel, tired, battered, unhappy and sorely disappointed with the world and himself, grew to disdain the company of others. They, for their part, and they meaning his family and his neighbours, indeed anyone who came within spitting distance of this unfortunate young boy, encouraged it knowing that it meant a respite from the petty arguments and sullen pointed silences that were the characteristic of any amount of time spent with him. 

Obviously at first, he couldn’t reconcile himself to their happiness, connected as it seemed to be the absence of his unwanted company among them. And so, at first he took to slinking around the people that he was still drawn towards, so his sick and jealous heart could snatch at these forbidden drops of honey when couples were alone together and whispered strange warm things quietly amongst themselves, or when people, children or old men and women who liked each other well, met and bandied memories and feelings. Before long his heart was fit to burst with everything he had stolen and he would barge in them to break up these private places where he was unwelcome and unwanted. But until then Lizarel sat hidden somewhere nearby quietly enjoying some strange sorrow in himself in being witness to these encounters he never fully understood. Why was he forbidden from these places? But whatever the reason, he soon was spending more time listening than fighting and he learned to seek out happier and nicer people to listen to, whose jokes and conversation he preferred over others. Then he found that he often had to convince himself to go get his due dismissal from them. Which he was always wont to do when his heart became too full and fit to burst with all that he had stolen that day, and he expelled it out through tears or rage and then he’d want to go home.  

Being alone constantly in company naturally lead Lizarel to view actual aloneness quite as a gift and reprieve. Soon he took to it with a vengeance and stopped going out entirely among people. But his absence from them meant didn’t mean that he didn’t somehow engage with them, and surrounded as he was by only the unspeaking, unquarrelsome trees and leaves of grass, he was free to do whatever he desired and nobody would disagree. And so while the first few days were certainly spent quietly, Lizarel soon started to use them in brooding endlessly about all the many ways in which his life had gone wrong and how he was to blame for all of them, extending that argument until he became the cause of the birth of the devilish fiends, for the drought and flooding of the lakes and for the existence of all that was wrong and bad in the world. But this hyperbolic melancholia was exhaustive. It requires a special skill to find things that are wrong in the world and to connect them time and again to one’s own perceived failings, to one’s quite small existence. And if there was anything that Lizarel thought he lacked, it was skill of any sort and measure. And so slowly Lizarel found himself walking away from people and when he couldn’t leave, quietened amongst company. In the mornings he would pack a small cloth with some bread and cheese and grapes and then set off by himself, to wander the small woods near his house. He was able to pass this off as a productive activity because he always came back with things from the woods that helped his mother in the house- little berries that could be eaten or used to add flavour to other things, some were even ground up to apply as salves on wounds and as medicine and he always had nuts and acorns and little snails in his pockets- all things that could be eaten, of which the little snails were the hardest to find and particularly succulent when roasted. For them he was willing to put his naked hands down through the light ant colonies, where for a few tense seconds his fingers would have to plunge through the middles of their forts to hunt quickly around their home for the peaceful underground sallowsnails that only or mostly lived symbiotically with the little hive-minded predators on the nesting floor. Both existing as they did off the half-eggs, unfertilized ant babies that the colony didn’t need and the snails quite liked. This was always a troublesome encounter for which he prepared often days before with materials and planning and he learnt to restrict himself to snail dinners only every other week, so that everyone had a fair chance at getting their favourite meals. He would pack his little hand-sewn sack (because the tailor didn’t like the look of his jaw) and he would steal his too-little portion of the day’s lunch and at first light, rush off to his woods and as soon as he walked past the land of the others and entered his own territory, he’d open up completely body and soul and spend a good quarter hour railing first about some perceived slight from that morning or continue yesterday’s if it was unfinished. Leaves crunching underfoot, light dappling everywhere above and the sounds and scents of the forest would soon become more real than anything else and the rant would grow tiresome and then Lizarel would stop. Then he would select a nice-looking tree or a sweet-smelling spot of grass and sunlight to lie down in and he would take his breakfast—a half of a slice of thick grainy bread and sweet and salty (and smelly) goat’s cheese on top. Lizarel has sat down in so many different spots but every time he does this, he stares at the skies and clouds, follows the sounds and quick movements of birds and little animals on the ground, he watches and perceives and studies everything he can within his eyes’ view calmly and quietly every day early in the morning. 

This successfully finished, he would then spend the day as his mood saw fit. Often wandering aimlessly around and about, he has spent hours looking interestedly at the economy and life of the small creatures, birds and insects whose home that woods was and nosily following them around, to their homes and workplaces, favourite foraging grounds and watering holes. In this way, he had made a complete tour of the not inconsiderable little backwoods. His woods, he would think often, and his plants and animals. They were more like his tenants than his friends though. And he prided himself upon knowing something about everyone that lived there. 

With one big exception. In his early days here, Lizarel spent a long time hunting for the tinkling water sounds he could hear everywhere. But just exploring the woods above-ground would never have yielded to him the young and meandering river-goddess of the forest. She moved around as much as any other living thing and only came above ground for very very important customers and reasons. Lizarel, when questioned about her, would say she was temperamental enough to drain and disappear underground if she doesn’t like who was drinking from her, and the rains and seasons in his part of the world unfortunately, didn’t care one jot about keeping its citizens sane at all. In fact, the weather seemed almost to have made up its mind to become at every moment precisely what its people, animals and land don’t want it to be, so all things combined, Lizarel stood no chance of ever impressing this little river and as matters go, would only have butted his obstinate head with hers. For she was stubborn herself and proud and required much praise and a certain natural elan of character in those that sought what she had to offer.  Our hero stood no chance with the damsel. She required nothing less than complete obeisance to her and the utmost mystery and drama in those rare friendships. She was a temperamental mistress. And she would never have stood for it if she knew that Lizarel first spied upon her and then plotted their friendship’s terms. 

Lizarel for his part would normally have preferred never to directly face such a (beautiful) princess and naturally by instinct, he would have slunk around her like a skunk and a graveyard dog, hungry but waiting patiently for his turn and share of the scraps. But his desire to meet the river came out of a practical need- not wanting to go back home in the day just for water, he required her cool refreshing services and she only allowed those that she liked to see her above-ground form. So for that, he needed to first find her and then charm her into liking him. So his first task was to try to find her. Until then, he nor any one had never caught any glimpse of a waterbody in that area but step far enough into the woods and a gentle tinkling melody is just one small part of the background noises of the forest. And the woods were always full yearlong, engorged and in full bloom on their food and their only lifeline and yet theirs was a poor land and not one where resources would go unexploited nor see food un    

To first catch a glimpse of her, He followed around a bunch of animals for a few days but nothing big enough for him to see was stupid enough to allow itself to be seen when making their rounds to their stream. Eventually he got lucky with the squirrels. Everyone (and lizarel) knows that squirrels need lots of water for their nuts to soak in before they can start cracking in on them so he took to hanging around certain trees that they were known to frequent. 

Long long ago, in a distant land, there was a mythical forest that lived, isolated from everything else in that world, popping up one day as a sudden dream, labyrinthine in its paths and ways and far older than reckoned the stories and legends that had sprung up in fear and awe of it. These legends often as not would speak of the many creatures and beings that had made a home there and I do not use the contrived hyperbolic when I say that there is no end to the number of stories written by adventurous and desperate storytellers who have gone forth bravely questing in discovery of that land, and who have written what we know so far about the Forest and its many attractions and ominous tourist traps, often one and the same, its plant life and creatures, beings and spirits, its haunted and otherwise mystical places and their powers and dangers, their allegorical troubles and treasures and so on and on in volumes of hard drives.  Even I am not god enough to catalog all these stories. 

In my own modestly adventurous travels though, I saw a cottage on the outskirts, the home of a couple awaiting their firstborn and it seemed to me that the truth and allegory derived from their life, would make excellent subject material and a unique and substantial grounding perspective with which to navigate my first foray into the annals of Forestories. And so I offer to you, my readers, the stories of this obviously ‘Adam and Eve’-esque couple, told to preserve and share the meaning of their lives for anyone who might care to know. And who might then walk away with something, anything of value or at the very least, a comforting hug and an escape from the troubles and times of personal despair. This endeavour is indeed an amateur undertaking, where the young make up for the tried and tested experience of the wizened by venturing boldly where none have gone before, thus making the very mistakes that teach experience in later days. 

So in order to start our journey, we must first find our way there, travel hundreds of imaginary miles, cross vast oceans and mountains, indeed many thereof and pass through the portal of language, leaving behind our own world and hovering lightly over theirs. Our first story is that of the forest. We must once again set about opening for this familiar song and drama, begin with a little stylized creation myth beginning and narrate the humble home brewed backstory for the Khanolin Greenemere, the original magical forest . 

Everywhere, the world is what we make of it, it is as vast as stretches our horizon, it stops where our perception, for whatever reason, can see no further. Things beyond that might as well not exist and most haven’t, to us at least. But to you dear reader, who are where I left you last, hovering over the vast green swathes of this Forest-world, only you can see the boundaries of this land, only you can say that it is not such a big or otherwise formidable looking forest at all. You might even feel the first pangs of disappointment at such a barely encouraging first glimpse. Such distance can generate only such perception. On the thick and well obscured ground, when clomping through the overflowing marshy undergrowths and across the sprawling treetops, Greenemere Khanol is an old old place sustaining the kind of living and life that has always been treated with the instinctive reverence that builds up amidst mobs and in distant towns, awe of something that we cannot understand and which beckons to us time and again. It is best to speak of this place in enigmas and parables; if one will forgive the initial cliches, their well-trodden but universal meaning will become more evident as one continues reading. 

The Khanol is unspeakably dense, the famous Who, the scholar famously described it as, “bigger on the inside”, and we have not yet had a single explorer map it from within in its entirety and come out. The kind of place where all sorts of trees and animals make their living, which, for those that may be interested, include specimens of those that we have scientifically accounted for in our botany and veterinary books, and those from our fictional and mythical records and by the estimation of our oldest almost deified philosophers, roughly about 47% of everything living that lies beyond our collective human imagination. Which it must be said is relatively childish and  in comparison to the other minds we have touched and felt, spread all over the cosmos, but I’m still quoting his venerated Who-minence. Most of these fantastical beings never leave the inner depths and I might employ the use of statistics one last time to say that the most popular estimation of the percentage of verifiable information we have over the Forest and its inhabitants is about 12%.  That does make for very interesting speculation but I have yet to see that conversation rise above that level of truth and I certainly do not endorse that number nor yet that scientific approach to the mysteries of this Forest. I will soon expound more clearly on my reservations but as for any current certainty about the Forest, all that should remain prefigured in mind is that none can be found anywhere else in the world that live and die and have the Khanol Greenemere for their ancestral home.

 And what an expansive and bewildering riddle of a home it is with so little known about its origins and current inhabitants and properties. Thus goes my first story                                                      about the Forest. 

What is in a name? What is a name capable of suggesting? To children, a name is given to commence the process of Identification and to herald the creation of their self-hood. Gods and places, inanimate objects and symbolic beings also have names but fundamentally their naming is an act of claiming, done by those not themselves, to give them identities and stories that act as their characterizing and symbolic signposts in Language. So that becomes a referrant in speaking of them and signifies doing so but in the handling of the more sensitive poets, a name of a thing can be praise and an honouring of virtue, ability and story that is celebrated and in any other way, it becomes a word that seems to characterize their particular property of being, something that takes on a shadow of the thing it denotes. It is the first step to remembering them in time and also very importantly, the first step in a ritual process of the educated, partaking in trade and business with meaning and symbolism in reference to these things. For this reason, I have not and do not intend in these my records, to refer to the Forest by any other name than the one I have given to it. The word Forest itself is its species designator, a useful characterisation which immediately makes evident, the barest quality of the thing we are discussing. After that, my own name tells us everything we need to draw out a loose fitting and distanced outline of this story’s most significant character. 

I chose to speak of the Forest as the “Greenemere Khanol”, and these papers are both the first time it has publicly been called in this way and an introduction to my own studies and perception of its being; and I’m not unaware of the admittedly vain attempt to write myself deeper into this story. Eitherway, Greenemere is a Celtic word- a sound from the old stories which refers to fertility and a more or less green-coloured verdant life that was often used to describe many forests of the myths, older and thus lost lands which luckily for their death, escaped the ravages of time and the greed of man’s machines alike. It is a hopeful yet fey word, a call for older, more savage and natural times that is in truth, a lament for all that is seen to be missing now and I thought it perfect to describe the dangerous and bewitching beauty of this land. “Khanol”, derived from the Persian word- Kanolhissa is a curiously feminine word, the formal poetic way to refer to an Oasis that is seen to come to us just as the desert seems almost to have defeated us. An unexpected boon when all seems to be lost. It has been used by many poets to refer to love, women and friendship, a sudden reversal of fortune, a reprieve of new life and beginnings just when it seemed that our death was looming over the horizon with his mossy sickle in hand. 

And thus we have our setting. A not entirely new but still, beautiful idea of unfettered life somehow magically bursting forth in full bloom in the midst of a vacuum of nothingness, a void around it stretching for leagues in each direction. The Khanol in its unity is the only living entity, or at least one of any consequence in its world. But how can that be? One cannot make anything from nothing, there is always something to come from and something to become and time is the engine or rather the fuel spent in living that separates the two. When there is a logical progression between the two, we call our understanding of the same Science. and when there simply isn’t, it is Magic or as I prefer to call it, the Imagination. But howsoever, there is always something behind the curtain. So who is the master of the Khanol, that created it from nothing? Is it there for some divine or otherwise cosmic purpose? And what could that conceivably be and conversely, have we actually figured it out in in some or any of our retellings of its creation and current life? My own submission to that list of questions is- are we too human to be able to understand it? Is purpose and meaning and our measuring scales of time, causation and justice, simply too minute and human a conception of this dense deep unsounding vastness? 

So who wins? those that get to live. Thus, I won, although tis a hollow victory because you didn’t win anything good, you just get to live with the memories of what happened and what your part was in all of it. what sort of life can come after that?

There is no sky, nothing to see upwards. only smoke, all air is grey-coloured now and that is what it will always be. and all around you is carnage, death, mutilation and by your feet a network of blood runs and gurgles, teeming from all the fallen to join together to form rivers and ponds where the grounds gives way.  You cannot do anything, look anywhere, step one step without getting closer to losing grip over yourself, to giving up control to something else that is sitting in your spot in your home: the trigger is not the bodies themselves, kill enough and you become desensitized to motion and the deed, to the blood, the innards, guts and the slop of humanity and its waste just lying about, strewn everywhere, disobeying its natural order and so far away from its proper place. It is your own traitorous mind, that looks at the torn and bloodied and otherwise rendered unrecognizable uniform on a mangled corpse and thinks that it might be your friend’s. Can you recognise your old squadron mate in cannon fodder, make out a familiar mark or tattoo on his body or his name and ranking somewhere on his outfit if it looks that way? that, those thoughts are enough to unhinge something crucial; then your mind runs away somewhere leaving you alone and surrounded by unfamiliar monsters, unknown house guests in your head to deal with what you’re processing; they are unfamiliar because you had never gone that far deep inside or wherever they came from but once you do, you recognise something in these new thoughts. you start to come to terms with the fact that it is your mind saying them, you revel in a new connection and different unknown untested ideas in a place that seems to be about killing everything old and known.

so do you touch it, the corpse that might be your friend’s. You kick out his burning hot legs from under him and straighten him out. Do you wrap something around your hands to protect yourself and gingerly attempt to turn over his body in respect or is it better to bloody yourself uncovered, unprotected in his departed humanity, in the physicality of his abandoned human vessel? and maybe that is more honest. Perhaps only then can you look his family in the eye and tell them the lie about his honorable and admirable death in the name of country, god, faith, whatever excuse paid for and justified this particular battleground. So you can spout the rhetoric of whichever fund pays for that medal of honour, courage, faith, resilience, whatever excuse and symbol of humanity that we get in exchange for giving up the real thing in totality? Since it is not my first such corpse, my hands move automatically, my brain functioning on half power, my emotions fully cut off, some part of me unrecognisable to myself and the other part silenced. If you could see my eyes, they’d be overbright. an inhuman light shining like a beam of life cutting through the smoke of death, shining brightly on corpse and soon-to-be corpse alike, reflecting off the field’s red veins,  illuminating in muted colours, an overworked mechanical  consciousness, that severed from its conscience still records every image and sound relentlessly in preparation for all the nights to come from now on. I knew what would happen. and yet i came. maybe war only revealed what was already broken.  

But this soldier is not done yet. I have been tasked to bring back mementos from this war, if not my friends themselves. I have made an oath to someone. I can’t remember or feel anything beyond these directives. I only know I must do it or die trying. I have been looking, time has no meaning, but I cant see my friends. I have searched many corpses and found friends but too late. Yet I hunt. For some reason, I cant ignore the directive to bring back souvenirs. If I ignore that and run away, my brain jolts at that inhuman thought, I think I will die. Whatever remains of me, whatever can live after the complete unhinging, I will not remain. 

So I try but I think all of my unit have died. and I am carrying many souvenirs on my back. I stop at yet another body that seems familiar, something itching in me to check this one out too for there I might find a friend I have forgotten. This is one of the more intact ones, most others are just a few limbs or horrible expressions but this body is male and he is very tall and seems important, with his 3 stars and thick boots that even here scream of some other value that died with its owner, a death by multiple stabbings. I fall down to my knees next to his face to look closely at his features and uniform but suddenly there is an aura of smell coming from him that even I cant stand too long and I don’t want to puke anymore so my hands search, frantically, ripping apart his uniform for any keepsake or memento that might still be on him and I pat down wherever there is clothing still only onto a half charred and already decomposing human body. He must have been dead for sometime, I wonder what is the time between the start of the war and where I am now and soon in his exposed innards, I can see the telltale white slimey things on him already that signal new life. This is a veritable feast for them, they must grow here and flourish, whole species and dynasties gorging their life cycles on single bodies and singular wars. They might even have minor evolutionary cycles during the course of each battle. They may not be similar in formation and behaviour to those that inhabit other battlefields. and maybe the space of time between another carnage is unfelt to them, what if they can hibernate after such a feast like bears do? But only perhaps and I wonder what do I know of maggots? Did I study science? 

Did he? I search for his name and find it: Eal Ma. This is as much as I can make of it, his captain’s uniform is drenched in his blood and it is crusty, sticking to my fingers as I search through him. I remember my friend from school, memories and old feelings coming back as my mind comes across new information, seeing more of the battleground on his body and it sifts through my memories and points out the connections between my old partner in crime and the body in front of me. I think this guy stole my prom date or he stole something from me but I don’t remember old anger, maybe we were just close enough for it not to matter or distanced enough for the pain to have faded without a scar. Simple connections are easier to handle.  

I don’t remember too well. My name is a word on my uniform, not a familiar notion. But I don’t care now, because under his left shoe, over his sock is a girl’s bracelet worn around the ankle. The skin around his ankle is still soft and soft skin makes me think of Tara. My mind skips ahead purposefully. I’m sure its called something similar but anklet doesn’t seem English. That can’t be right, right, Mister? you look back at your friend, but he doesn’t seem familiar... as far as you are aware you never made friends with a burnt corpse before.. now. hahaha life is good for some things. I get up off Mister, nod hastily in his direction, a parody of respect and move on. Thank you, friend. I wish I had you still now, I wish I could have helped you, I wish I wasn’t alone to face this battlefield by myself, to drag along with me this morbid collection of memories, sharing my burden lightening it but why did you have to fight on the other side? Strange. 

 I am really trying. I’m attempting to face up to my fears and my desires. I’m trying to own up to the fact that I am only human and as such susceptible to the fallacies that my nature has in store for me. I find though that I don’t want actually to face up to my fears. They are too big and too wild for me. It is like daring yourself to look into Medusa’s eyes because you tell yourself she’s just a myth and so are her powers, but how many of us will look into her eyes? … I know I’m not. 

And the truly sad part is today, yesterday and tomorrow make no difference to me. It is all starting to become a bit of a blur and I feel like I’m giving in to a naturally misanthropic , existential presence while I ‘should’ be out embracing my youth and power and intelligence. I feel like an old crone, with too many children to count, having yet another baby all the while knowing that she should have died in the war… though I’ll admit even I think it’s strange that I’m feeling like that.    

I was sitting in the bus one day and listening to some music when all of a sudden, time slowed down for me. I saw all these old, sad- looking women sitting in front of me, with huge bags and crying children on their laps, going to the market to get cheap tomatoes and suddenly, I was one of them.  With an alcoholic husband and 5 idiotic children to go home to. With no prospect of true happiness and no Gandalf coming to take me on an adventure.

And the best part is that I’m actually quite a normal person. I’m just going through a minor and very common quarter-life crisis which will probably abate as soon as I hit my early 20′s and then I’ll really start partying with old, grey hair and slowing reflexes and I’ll get a small job in a quiet town. Probably get married. Have a few kids. Drown in a few liters of alcohol and stop breathing one day… But I’ll have died long before that. I’ll have died the minute I convince myself to not fight for something because of my claptrap I’ve ‘intellectualized’ up. I’ll have died the minute I start to prefer the company of my cat to the human I’m hopelessly in love with because it’s easier to profess love to a dumb animal than it is to the undeserving prick (read: human) who is ‘setting fire to my loins’. (I dared myself to put that there).          

Dear Jolene (Like the song, yes), 

I’m thinking of old mackintoshes; of those wonderful old phones they used to have with all those wires that went into nowhere; I’m thinking of the blinding cobwebs that wound themselves around every nook and cranny at home... and the house. I remember, every time I would think about it, I'd think of that old, gothic novel- Rebecca by Du Maurier and that first sentence that would always give me the chills-“Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again”…

I don't know why I write to you anymore… But it is raining now. And it seems my penmanship and my ability to word-vomit are intricately connected to the rain… I'm lying. I write well and mostly to you when it thunders and lightnings because it reminds me of you… You, with your destructive path and your murderous ways and your walking all over everyone and anything that caught your fancy.  

It’s become almost dreamlike, my life that is. I get up every day and do my work, read about murder in the paper, kick some arse at school, but at night, when I'm sitting down to some nostalgic 90’s serial, I can't even remember a single interesting thought I had; when I try to think of someone different I met or saw in the café down my road which has become my haunt, they slip from my memory, just like those sweaty, almost-scary dreams one has toward 3 in the morning that one can't ever remember later… Maybe I should run away too like you did.Go to some small city whose name I can't pronounce and set up a small apothecary. It'll be a little life but a different one. And, I find myself craving these little differences and pleasures now more with you gone than ever before.  

I went back to ‘Manderley’ yesterday. I have some money saved up and I think I'll buy the house. I know what you'll say- bad decisions, thinking with your heart not your head, silly memories, life and moving on, karma… I've thought of them all and I still will though. Those rickety stairs, the sounds of the house ‘settling’ at night, the kitchen that somehow always smelled of apple pie, the attic with that wonderful trunk of old costumes from the last century, the windy trees and the bereft sea nearby that always created such a wonderful ‘set’ for our photos and our secret trysts. I can hear you laughing right now- ahh, me, aren't you saying? ‘But then she was always the more emotional and attached one… she hasn’t changed a bit’. You're wrong. I have and that’s why I need Manderley. I need to have something to hold on to… some memory, some souvenir, some memento of a past that is slipping away from me.    

 Do you remember our first kiss? It’s imprinted in my memory, with a grace and passion that still has the ability to shock me, even now, ages from thence. Your mum had just made us some pie, and we'd taken some extra in a tin, packed some orange juice and walked up to our secret, hidden, “I'll kill you if you tell anyone about this” cave. And with the breeze and the sweetness going down my throat and that wonderful sea to look at, it only seemed natural for me to turn and kiss you. I'm so glad you kissed me back. The only remedy for being in love is contamination… Bite the one that you love and hope that in the full moon, they will turn with you too. And together, you shall rule the midnight forests…  

As you have probably guessed, I miss you more than the earth misses the heat of the sun after a cold day. Come back to me. Because after all this time, I'm still into you.

Bises,

The rain pelted down on the windows and the closed doors of my coppery old house and suddenly, after a long time, I feel more alive and active than ever. What is it about the heavens bearing down in anger (or is actually lust?) upon our mortal souls that seem to make delighted children of so many of us? 

I'm now sitting down in my old chair in front of my old desk and I feel the room’s resentment at not having been used in such a long time. I, that would sit in front of my desk for hours every day, writing because the words needed an out or twiddling with my old typewriter, the only memento I can keep of a father that wanted a son. And, I’m sorry. I truly am sorry that I couldn't go inside that room in so long but.. when you’re old and decrepit and waiting for the man with the long cloak, you do all you can to avoid painful memories.. 

And those memories.. I can still smell the slight burn of the roasted meat as it slid down my throat. I can still taste that forbidden elixir, that drink of the gods that I used to love so much, that champagne  that would go down so easily.. But most of all, I remember the lights, the sway of the nubile, young bodies as they danced to the latest music and the ecstatic smiles of the people invited.. Oh, yes, I knew how to throw a party- and the best part? I was young and beautiful. Jeune et Jolie and my world knew no bounds.. an upcoming writer, a talented host with a gift for throwing parties that no one would forget in a hurry and la pièce de résistance? I was La Femme. That one woman that everyone wanted to take home; that everyone wanted on his arms to show off to friends; the woman so uninhibited, that pain and fear knew no names with her… 

And I would sit with my cigarette holder and my bejeweled, make-up bag and my admirers around me, each offering everything from a wonderful night-out to love and babies, or from the really bold, a night of long, powerful passion. And I said no and yes, like a Goddess.. Because, really, I was Aphrodite herself.. Who would dare displease the most beautiful woman in all of Paris? I was the goddess of love and beauty and of the arts and of writing.. Oh, I remember the stories I would write. Petite, lovely ones about dancing girls and strong-jawed Marquises, and money and diamonds and travel..   But how much of my own celebrated writing did I ever understand?  How much of my pen wrote to me?  

It feels strange to grow old.. because, really, no matter how much you tell yourself it’s coming somehow you expect to be pardoned…to be excused from the exercise. And, you know, most of the time one doesn't really notice that one is growing old, just that one is tired more often or that one has flabbier skin but then one day, you look into the looking-glass and you don’t know anything anymore…and then the real fun starts- the self-doubt, the oppressive loneliness. The cold bitter winter of one’s life has begun and one has just realized that one’s forgotten the wintercoat and gloves… 

A girl is looking into a cluttered room filled with paraphernalia from ages gone by… and I watch as a man enters and instantly, the room is his. It is his rocking chair that he is walking toward, his faithful hound that is trailing in after him to curl up on his feet and his red fire that is warming the company tonight. 

And beside his rocking chair, is the thing that attracted the girl in the first place. Dark mahogany-fashioned shelves that housed books. Tens of thousands of books in every human language ever written in and then some. Books on botany and historiography and the science of divining the future and the art of understanding the present. Tattered books that needed to be handled carefully lest their contents be lost forever, taken by that fiend- time and decay and books that had just been bought yesterday, that needed only to be opened for them to sing of the heroic stories they contained. 

The girl watches with a now jealous gleam to her dark eyes and the man, gets up slowly and walks toward the bookshelf. He picks up a small, red book, walks back to his arm-chair, sits down, puts on his glasses, strokes his old dog and thus settles in for a quiet evening with a glass of old scotch handy. And the girl is jealous. “Because I cannot do that. I have lives to take, and babies to steal in the dark of the night and I cannot have that. Those simple creature comforts” she thinks.. She cannot sit down on that arm-chair, stroke that lovely dog and read that book, that talks of such alien things.. love? lust ? life?  “What do I know of life”, she asks herself. “I only understand the language of pain.. of loss.. and why not, of death..,”  

I don’t know for how long I stood outside the room, looking in through that infernal glass being unable to actually touch my paradise, when I glanced upon my own reflection in the glass... “Why, my skin- my beautiful, bright skin, she sags like an old woman’s and my dark eyes- where is the passion in them?. My straight back- which old lover took you away from me, leaving me with this bent and sunken body that is youthful no more?”  and then she murmurs-”Have I always been like this?” 

And then with a sigh that seemed to be echoed by the windy trees, she sneaks into the room. The man, by now has fallen asleep, with a look of such content upon his face that for the first time, in all her existence, she hates herself for what she has come to do. For the first time, she questions her meaning , her existence, her answers that she had accepted so easily before.. And being left with no choice, I quickly bend down and bestow a small kiss upon his old face and with a soft tremble, I watch as he exists no more. 

I’m driving now and this road extends over mountains and rivers.  I’m going over brooks and little shanties and small villages that house small dreams. I don’t know where I’m going. I suppose once the road ends I’ll have to stop. But I don’t want to. I don’t want to not feel the wind over my face and make airwaves with my hand. I don’t want to take off my sun glasses. I don’t want to look back and not see a different hilltop or river glinting in the sun at me. 

I stop now for a moment to stretch my legs and find the place I have stopped at, like a lot of things I’ve seen in this trip inordinately beautiful. There are big, shady trees all around and a small dusty road winding around this fôret that I’m in. I walk a little further on and find a small, dusty man selling fresh looking cut fruits by the side of the road. I stop and ask him for some cut pineapples. And as the delicious, sweet taste of the yellow pineapples fills my mouth, the man in the tradition of all inquisitive, old men asks me what I’m doing. And I tell him and when I finish, with a look of pride in his face, the dusty fruit-seller tells me he has a son who is studying in a small engineering school nearby. He tells me that his son wants to be an engineer and live in the big city. He tells me that he is looking to find his son a nice, educated wife so he won’t be lonely in the big city. And when I asked him why he wouldn’t go to the ‘big city’ if he could, he says that he is happy enough selling cut fruits to lost, world-weary travellers like myself.  

I wonder, sometimes now, if I will ever feel that sense of purpose and direction that that man felt doing his little bit. I get back into my own car and I drive away forever.

I wonder why, quite often the people that I wish would leave me alone, don't. And the ones I wish I could breathe in and imprint upon my very soul are the runners. 

I dream often that I want and need to run. that I've donned my running shoes and have warmed up, and just as I've set a nice pace, and am cruising along, I'm stopped... almost permanently; by animals, by cars, by horse-drawn carriages carrying newly-weds and by hearses carrying dead couples. I know what it means; that I want to do well... but life will slow me down, stop me even. I will have to let loves and deaths, even engine-fuelled motor cars drive by me in my quest to find the people that matter to me.  

And yet, in a very juvenile manner, I'm afraid of giving meaning to something as fleeting and senseless as a human life. Why should my happiness depend upon their own collected and scattered cells of loves and fears and lusts?  Why should I?   Is it because in doing so, I am conforming to an idea and a concept that is as old as time itself- sharing?  loving, even?  Or is it because in doing so, I shall be a traitor, a liar, not to the universe which is too vast and too thoughtless to pay attention to me but to the one person that does matter- myself. I, that have always espoused living, not just existing or staying alive..

I have recently through a series of drunken revelations and sordid discoveries found out some truths about myself. and I don't like them. It seems it is not just my life, my existence that makes no sense.. but, as if it wasn't already a given, I myself don't make sense. I want to be alone, yet I am afraid of loneliness. I want to make sense and matter, yet I am afraid of mattering too much (if such a thing could exist). I want to love and feel human, yet I despise humanity and all it has come to stand for.

I have a dream and while it does not necessarily involve a glittering Hollywood movie after I've died, with a star cast that looks better than I ever will, I have a dream. And that dream is one day, I will find the black turtle of spasmodic awesomeness. and after, I find that black turtle, which I will un-originally call Blacky, or Dopey, I shall retire to the bavarian black forests, or the amazonian rainforests and I shall be a hermit and eat and drink the ambrosia of the gods, because I will have discovered the meaning to life. Or atleast my meaning, to my life. There must be a black turtle for everyone, so that all can discover the ancient truths of which the Buddhist and Indian monks and hermits spent aeons searching, and thought they had found. 

I don't suppose anyone understands.. But that's what I'm supposed to suppose. I'm an angsty guilt-ridden sexually-frustrated, parent-hating teenager, so that's the only politically correct way I'm supposed to deal with hardship, so... 

I'm a bit confused (as can be easily supposed). I'll start over. 

I look at pieces of the moon on my window-sill and wonder why the night must be so hauntingly beautiful sometimes and a terrifying ordeal other times. I wonder if people would know it was night if the moon wasn't there.. on a metaphysical level, that is. I wonder what the land of the midnight sun, is like where it is sunny 3-4 months of the year, and plunged in darkness the rest of the time. I want to assert my dominance on the physically challenging areas of human superiority and lie down to a peaceful death for the mental complications. I wish there was a way to remove the influence of society on man, while still making man.. social. Is there a way, I wonder, to make a man look at a beautiful piece of art and not think immediately,of something utterly and impossibly intelligent and witty or stupid and inane, but to just look at it, and wonder why man needs, unlike any other being on this planet, to look at something, beautiful a person, a piece of rock, dust motes in the wind, and think my god, that is so beautiful, I must capture it, and make it mine. And, so take it home, or take a photo of it, or draw it, or sculpt it, or byheart it or... 

Maybe, the truly beauteous things in the world, are the ones that you cannot see unless your eyes are covered with the rose-coloured spectacles of love. Is that why, some people can go through life living in matrimonial bliss with just one person, and not feel empty? Because, love makes every new and drearily same day an adventure. 

One sun-shiny and bright day, I was given a word-flower. And I don’t think I have ever liked an inanimate, symbolic thing more than I did that petite flower. And it really was petite, but it was sent to me as a reminder that it doesn’t really matter the size of a gift, if the feelings behind sending it are pure. And they were pure.. they were kind and sweet and smelled of old sweaters on rainy days and hugs that go on; of black and white movies watched over and over again, because really, one can never have enough of Ingrid Bergman; they reminded me of being young and carefree and not worried about my next bill; they reminded me of summers that lasted forever and beach houses and winters that were spent under warm quilts, with our bodies pressed together, as we lay huddled in my bed, not talking, but being there, because we’ve forgotten the pleasure of silences shared.. 

It didn’t say who it was from, but I don’t need a sender’s address to recognize the handwriting, to maybe even recognize the smell( was that in my head?) that clung to the flower.  I know I have no control of my destiny, but I think I have some control over who gets to break my virgin heart.. and I’m still glad it’s you that did it.

I could at the same time, hear and not hear the thump, thump, thump of the music beat and I let it wash over me.. I could see people I liked and people I didn't like all become one and nothing mattered anymore. I think the DJ was playing good music.. but I don't know, and it didn't matter.. Because, I was swaying and jumping and running and yelling to my own music. I could feel very clearly the thumping of my heart, and I remember I was very happy to think that everybody else could too, because we were drunk on it.. We were drunk on the fact that we were young and careless, and could afford to make mistakes.. because, really, how did it matter? Nothing, except for that we were all there in that crowded gazebo listening to mad music and dancing to our own tunes... and responsibilities, deaths, unhappiness.. knew no names there..  Because what does it matter that death is waiting for us, just around the corner? What does it matter, that we may never hold new life in our hands and marvel at the simplicity and yet traditionality of such a gesture.

 It mattered not to a group of young adults who gathered at a small watering hole and shot each other up with insomniac dreams and wild pleasures. You know the phrase- dance all night? We did more than just that.. We loved all night.. We loved the stars for twinkling and looking like intoxicated gods high up in their heaven, drinking ambrosia and looking down in approval at us. We loved our hearts for deciding to beat the rhythm, so we could hear the same beat and lose our minds to the unity of it.. We loved each other just because we could. We looked up 'amour' in our hearts and found we had more entries there than Google ever will.