The eternal search for the next stranger. When does 

The Show

A large portion of our facial expressions are lost if we wear glasses. Those of us, who bear the scars of ageing, look like wizened old fools with glasses. And if we don't clean our glasses everyday, half the things we want to communicate gets lost in the process of face to face conversation or even acting. Over time, our facial muscles freeze. We stop trying to emote with our face, rather we modulate our voice or control our unforced bodily impulses. But our faces express so much! How can we not desire to let go of glasses and reveal our entire face to people.

My naked eyes have a dreamy lost expression chained to them perpetually. Maybe, this expression was evoked because, on reflection from a mirror, the eyes were looking back at themselves after a lapse of 14 years. Eyes finding eyes. Realizing they are not the color we supposed them to be. Realizing that the face beneath the eyes has lines which mark the moments when we had to tighten our faces and bear through the best or worst of times. With glasses, you fail to share yourself completely with people. But who wants that part of the bargain? I took off my glasses. I wanted to put down my guards and meet you with all my troubles, lining my frame  like a silhouette. Till I realized, that silhouette, like my pair of lenses wont come off at the right moment.

Because you just wanted the happy moments between us, when we shared interesting or funny thoughts and laughed or lamented together. You never wanted to know you might be the cause of the lament or the reason behind the happy thought.

As you rightly put, its fun knowing me as a person, talking and learning about so many new things. An intellectual companionship. But that's about it! Don't overstep because there is nothing more for you.


I will go back to my glasses. I realized there is no point revealing my eyes to everyone.

Because the eyes express so much. 

Hailey's Comet

Sometimes when I am feeling jobless and just plain ignorant, I go through the contacts on my phone. I dont like playing mobile games much, Snakes is okay but Sudoku is too demanding on one's lack of concentration and that music thingy is noisy. I use a basic nokia handset. I think in this relatively pointless exercise of going through these names and their numbers I do something more productive than fantasise about my past.

Its surprising the rate at which people zoom into our lives and then fade and then in some strange cyclical fashion come back. Really strong emotions like love, hatred, disgust, lust are experienced with such  Hailey's comet like personalities. You will stay up nights and talk with them, wait outside their house or hostel (if you are not let in past the curfew hour), imagine breaking into the same residence, text till your phone runs out of text balance and you resort to mycantos or way2sms. After all this talking, when you have find each other interesting and all, someone makes the mistake of liking someone else. Then suddenly the conversations stop because feelings have got involved, feelings of a definable nature. Expectations have been created, routine affections need to be expressed! And then the comet departs and we wait till the next new comet arrives.

But in all of this, there are some people we think about all the time. Or maybe things they said or ponder over, repeatedly, a moment we spent with them. It can be simply a moment when you stared into their eyes, from behind dust stained glasses, wondering whether they are thinking what you are thinking at that point of time. Or it can be someone standing outside your door, pretending to be a weight-lifter with a tiny umbrella.

Change is a vital force in my life. Its positive effects make me realise that loosing sleep over failed relationships is not really worth it because hardly any relationship fails per se. Maybe the way we wanted to remain in the other person's life changes but seldom does anyone leave completely. Because even the strongest of bonds becomes loose and transforms with time. I like the idea of stimuli jumping over synapses from the loose ends of dendrons. I have a feeling that after a point, my best interactions with people are like that. Jumping stimuli. If it comes for a sustained period, my nerves become tense.

The value of departing from a person's life at the right time, with just the right amount of information left behind becomes all the more essential now. I have embraced the traveller side of my personality. Two rejections in ten months was quite enough to make me realize that I'll not find happiness in love. And I have an excuse from God as well. One ex notes, "Being in love with you is like being Man Friday on an island, where you are Robinson Crusoe." I guess that has changed in several ways but its a handy divine excuse, through a human messenger.

So I leave. Knowing that the person I care about has other greater problems than me and I can visit other planets for the time being.

And text people or call those who still haven't appeared in their scheduled time.

"Like many folk, when first I saddled my rucksack,
feeling its weight on my back-
the way my spine
curved under it like a meridian-

I thought: Yes. This is how
to live. On the beaten track, the sherpa pass, between Krakow
and Zagreb, or the Serbian white
cells of scattered airports.

it came clear as over a tannoy
that in restlessness, in anony
mity:
was some kind of destiny.

So whether it was the scare stories about Larium
-the threats of delirium-
and baldness-that lead me not to a Western Union
wiring money with six words of Lithuanian,

but to this post office with a handful of bills
or a giro; and why, if I am stuffing smalls
hastily into a holdall, I am less likely
To be catching a greyhound from Madison to Milwaukee

than to be doing some laundry
is really beyond me.
However,
when, during routine evictions, I discover

alien pants, cinema stubs, the throwaway
comment-on a postit-or a tiny stowaway
pressed flower and bottom drawers.
I know these are my souvenirs

and, from these crushed valentines, this unravelled
sports sock, that the furthest distances I've travelled
have been between those people. And what survives
of holidaying briefly in their lives."

Waiting for the world to change.

Different subject positions in different parts of the same day. Sometimes I am the person who waits and sometimes I am the person waited upon.
Hours pass in anticipation of something to happen, a word of confirmation but nothing occurs. Its as if the world has conspired to envelop me in a coccoon of diplomacy and keep things neutral. Emotions, like an excess of energy, are waiting to pour out of my mind and body and yet there is no conduit to receive it.

The Trap

By Nicanor Parra

During that time I kept out of circumstances that were too full of mystery
As people with stomach ailments avoid heavy meals,
I preferred to stay at home inquiring into certain questions
Concerning the propagation of spiders,
To which end I would shut myself up in the garden
And not show myself in public until late at night;
Or else, in shirt-sleeves, defiant,
I would hurl angry glances at the moon,
Trying to get rid of those bilious fancies
That cling like polyps to the human soul.
When I was alone I was completely self-possessed,
I went back and forth fully conscious of my actions
Or I would stretch out among the planks of the cellar
And dream, think up ways and means, resolve little emergency problems.
It was at that moment that i put into practice my famous method for interpreting dreams
Which consists in doing violence to oneself and then imagining what one would like,
Conjuring up scenes that I had worked our beforehand with the help of powers from other worlds.
In this manner I was able to obtain priceless information
Concerning a string of anxieties that afflict our being:
Foreign travel, erotic disorders, religious complexes.
But all precautions were inadequate,
Because, for reasons hard to set forth,
I began sliding automatically down a sort of inclined plane.
My soul lost altitude like a punctured balloon,
The instinct of self-preservation stopped functioning
And, deprived of my most essential prejudices,
I fell unavoidably into the telephone trap
Which sucks in everything around it, like a vacuum,
And with trembling hands I dialed that accursed number
Which even now I repeat automatically in my sleep.
Uncertainty and misery filled the seconds that followed,
While I, like a skeleton standing before that table from hell
Covered with yellow cretonne,
Waited for an answer from the other end of the world,
The other half of my being, imprisoned in a pit.
Those intermittent telephone noises
Worked on me like a dentist's drill,
They sank into my soul like needles shot from the sky
Until, when the moment itself arrived,
I started to sweat and to stammer feverishly,
My tongue like a veal steak
Obtruded between my being and her who was listening,
Like those black curtains that separate us from the dead.
I never wanted to conduct those over-intimate conversations
Which I myself provoked, just the same, in my stupid way,
My voice thick with desire, and electrically charged.
Hearing myself called by my first name
In that tone of forced familiarity
Filled me with a vague discomfort,
With anguished localized disturbances which I contrived to keep in check
With a hurried system of questions and answers
Which roused in her a state of pseudo-erotic effervescence
That eventually affected me as well
With a feeling of doom.
Then I'd make myself laugh and as a result fall into a state of mental prostration.
These ridiculous little chats went on for hours
Until the lady who ran the pension appeared behind the screen
Brusquely breaking off our stupid idyll.
Those contortions of a petitioner at the gates of heaven
And those catastrophes which so wore down my spirit
Did not stop altogether when I hung up
For usually we had agreed
To meet next day in a soda fountain
Or at the door of a church whose name I prefer to forget.

For no one in particular

আমি বৃষ্টি দেখেছি, বৃষ্টির ছবি এঁকেছি

আমি রোদে পুড়ে ঘুরে ঘুরে অনেক কেঁদেছি

আমার আকাশ খেলা দেখার স্বপ্ন থামেনি

শুধু তুমি চলে যাবে আমি স্বপ্নেও ভাবিনি

আমি বৃষ্টি দেখেছি...

চারটে দেওয়াল মানেই নয়েত ঘর

নিজের ঘরেও অনেক মানুষ পর

কখন কিসের টানেও মানুষ পায় যে খুঁজে বাঁচার মানে

ঝাপ্সা চোখে দেখা এ শহর

আমি অনেক ভেঙে চুড়ে আবার শুরু করেছি

আবার পাওয়ার আশায় ঘুরে ঘুরে, ঘুরে ঘুরে মরেছি

আমি অনেক হেরে গিয়েও, হারটা শিকার করিনি

শুধু তোমায় হারাব আমি স্বপ্নেও ভাবিনি

আমি বৃষ্টি দেখেছি...

হারিয়ে গেছে তরতাজা সময়

হারিয়ে জেতে করেনি আমার ভয়

কখন কিসের টানেও মানুষ পায় যে খুঁজে বাঁচার মানে

ঝাপ্সা চোখে দেখা এ শহর

আমি অনেক স্রোতে বয়ে গিয়ে অনেক ঠকেছি

আমি আগুন থেকে ঠেকে শিখে অনেক পুড়েছি

আমি অনেক কষ্টে অনেক কিছুই দিতে শিখেছি

শুধু তোমায়ে বিদায় দিতে হবে আমি স্বপ্নেও ভাবিনি

আমি বৃষ্টি দেখেছি, বৃষ্টির ছবি এঁকেছি

আমি বৃষ্টি দেখেছি, বৃষ্টির ছবি এঁকেছি

আমি বৃষ্টি দেখেছি, বৃষ্টির ছবি এঁকেছি

আমি বৃষ্টি দেখেছি, বৃষ্টির ছবি এঁকেছি

আমি বৃষ্টি দেখেছি, বৃষ্টির ছবি এঁকেছি

Riding Streetcars

Dear Blanche,

I got your letter just a while back. I have dispatched a cruise ticket to help you sail all the way upto the Caribes. I'll be meeting you there! Don't get distracted while sailing past Bahamas, those sailors have a penchant for playing with people's emotions.

It was so, how should i describe it, so nerve wracking to receive a letter from you. I heard your husband shot himself some months back. But the person who gave me the news, he was gay. He spoke longingly about your husband. And at one point, he broke down and cursed you for your husband's death. He asked me to pass on this letter to you. Said it was meant for you, when you were putting up at Hotel Flamingo.

Sweet dreams till sunbeams find you
Sweet dreams that leave all worries behind you
But in your dreams whatever they be
Dream a little dream of me

Yes, dream a little dream of me

I crave for your attention.

Its not that you arr attractive but all my heart grew active when you came into view..

I crave for your attention more so, when I realize that you systematically, unconsciously, treat me as a person without significance.

I  stopped talking with him and that's why I have not been talking with anybody over the past few weeks..

Where does that leave me? As nobody? Do you just pick up your receiver to talk to a dial tone which soon grows dead? Do you talk to a receiver then? A receptacle, like a jug your pour water into when you have no better use for it or you cant drink it. I wonder. How you manage to do what only Enlightenment thinkers did with such aplomb. Obliterating a person's significance, his individuality, his desire to be wanted. Yes, desire and some answered questions. Thats where this hallucination started. Some months back. Or maybe some 9 years back.

Whenever I return home these days, a home where i live with my family and not alone, I realize I have no one apart from my family.

Well, you know, it could have been much worse.

Ah yes, what did that night yield to us? An evaluation of a pair? As to who is a good human being and who is not? The guilt function had one positive effect, it erased all possibilities of a weakness. The bad effect, the nullification of an identity to a sub-zero level. I am reading all the meanings I want to read, into a pretty simple situation among three drunk people. But i learnt that from you. What did I learn from you?

When we maximize our potential to desire, we effectively rewrite the meaning of the past, the present and the future. For ourselves. for people who are trying to connect with us.

But who am I to infer maxims from your life, Blanche DuBois? After all, we are so alike in the way we selectively choose to tell our stories, erasing out our ugly deeds and smoothening out those reckless desires which we couldn't reciprocate. Both of us have found comfort in the company of strangers.

All our conversations are forced. They have to be forced because we aren't really attracted to each other. We are each other's compromise. You, being the Tarantula, always have new victims in the waiting. New people to chase and get over once the chase is over, because even our desires turn out to be flawed creatures. Inflexible mostly. They leave us, isn't that what we conclude. Isn't that what i wanted to conclude about us as well? That you left me?

No.

I didn't conclude that. We were never together in the first place. I miss those 11-4 conversations when we sang paper moon together, for 3 months 2 days, 1 year 4 months or 5 years and a semester.

The world's a temporary parking place

A bubble for a minute

You smile, the bubble has a rainbow in it

Say, its only a paper moon

Sailing over a cardboard sea

But it wouldn't be make-believe

If you believed in me

Yes, it's only a canvas sky

Hanging over a muslin tree

But it wouldn't be make-believe

If you believed in me

Without your love

It's a honky-tonk parade

Without your love

It's a melody played in a penny arcade

It's a Barnum and Bailey world

Just as phony as it can be

But it wouldn't be make-believe

If you believed in me

Our conversations never ended. I just grew quiet. I wont talk unless you feel that you need to talk to me, not as a substitute for your desires.

I really share nothing in common with you. Your sibling was wrong. I am not anyone's part 2. I am me.

That's why, sometimes I regret asking certain questions. I step back, I say sorry without explaining my apology. I really have no right to ask you any question. You underline it everyday, that I am a nobody for you.  

I don't know where this is coming from, but the man looked troubled and underslept. Guess he still cant get over the death of his homosexual lover :P

See you soon,

Love

Your college sweetheart,

Shep Huntleigh.