Getting Away

Guess I was born to make mistakes
But I ain’t scared to take the weight
So when I stumble off the path
I know my heart will guide me back
.

Growing up is sometimes synonymous with growing away. Actually, most of the times. Growing apart. From people, places and things you have essentially grown to love all your years. Every 5 years or so I transcend everything I ‘ve known in that exact timeframe. And it utterly, completely, totally sucks. I love airports for this exact reason. Something bout leaving - depatures - makes me happy. It may stem from being a self confessed escapist. Or I could run some Jungian or Alderian analysis bout my cracked psyche and whip up an entirely new theory about my predilection for getting away when I am in the middle of things. The calmer the world around me gets, the faster I want to escape it. All bets must be off if I stay within the parameters of any given situation.
At 18, I left Uni to explore what the cliches hanging large in the big bad world. It wasn’t half as dangerous or elusive as it was painted out to be but the experience made me a more “solid” person, in a manner of speaking.
At 21, I went back to complete my degree and realized that my simmering disdain for conventional education was in fact a more here-to-stay variety hatred that would make it almost impossible for me to contemplate studying in this environment anytime in the future. Boxplots and Keynesian theories aside.
At 22, I left a secure job to welcome 6 months of dreaful penury because I couldn’t quite wrap my brains around the whole corporate stoogery that is hardwired so well in most of the middle class populi in this city. Or perhaps, the country.
At 24, I ate crow, went back to the confines of a rickety building that enabled me to understand myself better just by understanding the larger society I was now supposed function within. Hello, Journalist!
At 25, I ‘ve commenced living alone in a city thats alternatively referred to the city of dreams and the city of vultures. Pick, choose, stay or leave.
True, that!
So, at every stage something had to be left behind to make room for something new. Something fresh and less complacent. I am often guilty of bolstering a sang froid that makes most of the congrey I’ve managed to cultivate along the way querulous, frequently. But, this who I’ve chosen to become. This is me. As of today.

Inner Dj’s spinning Erykah Badu - Did’nt Cha Know?
Inner Bookslut is devouring “The Second Sex”. Again. Sigh!

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) disaster.

Things that make you go….WTF?

Are you content with your armchair feminism? The nonsensical reporting on Trans threads on equally ludicrous sites where the debates clearly eschew any real conversations about the real issues affecting a multitude of women everyday and everywhere. The non-white face of the feminist movement.

What will it take for you to be provoked enough to stand up and scream “Enough!”

Really now, what does it take?  Does it take this?

Mugabe’s youth militia has been raping and impregnating adolescent girls in Zimbabwean villages leading to a spike in the population of pregnant teens. Purportedly. I don’t how much can you fabricate such appalling facts. A political analyst reminds me that politics is a dirty game and everything goes. Well, fuck you too, then!

Disparaging, you’d say. But is that enough?  To condemn and then move on without letting splintered guilt pierce your partially dead conscience. Why isn’t someone doing something about this? Robert Mugabe is a monster and that’s a well documented fact and yet there has been no direct action against the man notorious for heaping hell on his own people. Here is someone who is possibly a dozen times more lethal and dangerous than Saddam could ever be, even if that’s a seriously odious comparison, and yet the G8 conveniently has forgotten and chosen to turn a blind eye to all that continues to occur in Zimbabwe. Possibly coz there aren’t oil deposits glimpsing from behind mud thatches that house some of the worst human rights violations in the history of humanity.

What does it take beyond pilfering, massacring, murdering, decapitating, mutilating and just plain annihilating? To ravage an entire people and yet there are those demented conspiracy theorists who proffer their unasked for advice and solicit sympathies for a man who can only be referred to as a mass murderer. And I’m being uncharacteristically kind here.

This probably doesn’t provoke you enough. Possibly coz its not convenient to extend the supposedly feminist thoughts to a real cause as opposed to just plainly posting retarded reviews of equally retarded “progressive” dissertations of failed academics.  

How about this one then?

The enlightened Saudi regime has ordered 350 lashes for a research student whose “scandalous” crime was to communicate with her biochemistry professor over the phone. These phone calls apparently caused the breakdown of her marriage leading to a divorce. The wiseasses interpreting Sharia for the rest of the populace decided that its only fitting that they beat the woman and her “accomplice” black and blue. Perhaps that will drill some sense into women who, shudder, decide to pursue biochemical research or indulge in a little tete-a-tete over the phone and worse still, walk out on their husbands coz, well, they want to.

Yes, you are hollering from every street corner and stop sign, saying that We are liberated freethinkers coz we can choose to be single mothers and thank god for sperm banks, or that we can amass Jimmy Choos for our upscale social dos, we experiment with unconventional (god alone knows what that’s supposed to mean!) living arrangements and relationships but what about the other half? Is this the life they(We) deserve or more importantly, desire?

Feel Good Inc

 

..Coz I’m starting quarter life crisis today. Happy Fuckin B’day to me.

Love forever love is free
Let’s turn forever you and me

Things you can’t count

..inside your head.

 

 

I am not the snarled strings of the spool in my lap

I am not the hours of smoke creating clouds around my head

I am not the shards of Time I fractured with primeval knives

I am not the flecks of red swimming in my eyes

I am not the silhouette that left this room in 1987

I am not the apparition that floated back in 1998

I am not the Passage of minutes soaked in chemicals and sanguinity

I am not the whiff of emptiness that abounds in these vaults

I am not this urbane void

I am not the subliminal lyric I plagiarize

I am not the perspicacity of this transient thought

I go with the flow, I ride with the tide, I got glide in my stride.

R.I.P  Mr Carlin.

“ I’m hangin’ in, there ain’t no doubt, and I’m hangin’ tough, over and out.”

 

Arriving somewhere..

…but not here.

Did you imagine the final sound as a gun?
Or the smashing windscreen of a car?
Did you ever imagine the last thing you’d hear as you’re fading out was a song?

Ex lovers and bad coffee. Somehow that train of thought refuses to depart from the my over-cafeinated brain’s foreground.
Moving on is a casually thrown around term. Breakups, getting fired, getting divorced and sometimes all of those together. The most gallantly offered form of intellectual advice is - Move on. No one tells you how but everyone wants you to move on.
Never quite comprehended the concept in its entirety. This obligatory journey of “moving on” - is it an actual, physical movement or displacement or moving on inside my head. What does it take to forget?
Isnt the act of forgetting someone a warmly nurtured antithesis?
You can never forget someone when you are in the middle of making some rather lousy attempts to..well..forget someone.
Then one fine morning you wake up and they are gone. Disappeared into thin air, not their physical existence in your scheme things but your feelings for them. Of what they constituted inside your head. It is just that simple. It happens when you are busy making plans to trek to Tibet or Kinnaur and in between trawling through gorgeous Llahsa landscape shots, it comes to you on a misty Monday night, He is not here. Not physically, not anymore. And whats even more surprising is that you are perfectly ok with not wanting him here.
This seemingly unforgettable article from your past is now its own shadow. It will forever be relegated to that dark corner. Penumbra. You won’t pine or yearn or desire. You’ve ceased to Love. Him. And someone else is drifting into your consciousness even as He is losing shape.
Un-Love.
Love’s left. Perhaps not. Its definitely shifted gears. Its pledging its legions elsewhere and that which seemed that most significant aspect of your life has now become a distant apparition. Its very being is thin air and nothing more.
Transience is Life’s greatest virtue. That everything will change and it will still go on. That is moving on, from where I stand today.
I dislike such vapid phrases like “going with the flow”. I’m not that passive, I’d rather direct the flow that get swept by the undercurrent and then cry hoarse for the next decade about how unfair people and emotions can be.
No siree, that doesn’t cut ice for me.
So, my definition of moving on is decidedly based on my favorite thing in the world - travelling. backpacking in fact. You are always hard up for funds and yet the excitement of discovery keeps you pacing forth with energy indescribable in words. One fine day you are standing dumbfounded at the foot of the mighty mountains looking at Rakcham or perhaps marvelling at the magnificience of Santorini and you’ve moved on.
Physically. Emotionally. Spiritually.

You’re bringing on the heartbreak…

Gypsy, sittin lookin pretty
A broken rose and laughin’ eyes
You’re a mystery
Always runnin’ wild

You are..

Cugat’s guitar strings. Vangelis’s exquisite symphony. Still. Hazel lines in my morning cupcakes. Delicate moments sprinkled in Kyoto’s murmuring orchards. The savoring of Syrrah. Scherezade’s beautiful consort. The eager aurora of my December sky. Flawless. The unhurried blooming of a Cinnamon rose. Soul’s Elevation. Black Orpheus. Blue diamonds.

Places of untouched grandeur and unmeasured love. Scintillation of slow burning intellect wrapped in a father’s nurturing touch. A resonant silence thrown into the ever expansive voids of love and beyond. Zephyrus descending. Spring sunrise.

Elysian dreams. Mind’s muse. Perfection without restraint. Lips and eyes of a million tales from the gorge’s heart. Movement and beauty. Beauty and Desire. Woven to grow like a tender vine. Alvarez’s intensity. With expression. Without masquerades. Inveterate humor. Undulating ardor caressing the ocean’s lonesome heart. Untold epics of unknown lands. Ephemeral. Etched in the caverns of my craving mind.

You are…the beginning of everything thats pure and its eternal bliss.

Unforgettable. That you can make a piano weep and laugh. All at once.
Magician.

Don’t tell my mother…

 

 

…that I am in love with him!

UnLove

La Vie C’est La Vie

And there’s a man whose lightest word
Can set my chilly blood afire;
Fulfillment of his least behest
Defines my life’s desire.

- Jessie Redmon Fauset

The Unknown Gradient.
He possesses the air of a razor-sharp raconteur. Or so they’d have me believe. The belle(noire) of the chaotic ball has finally found her match maybe?
So an anecdote becomes the antidote.

What is it with flights and memories?
The book, the view, the awkward position and the looming speech - conspicuous elements to render you uncomfortably numb and dumb for the rest of your sodden travel and perhaps your life. I, on the other hand, am given to such uniquely cataclysmic elements making even my oddest of days.Till it happened.
Till he appeared. Or re-appeared. White and denim. Casually casual. I am on all fours. Literally. Because I am searching for the keys that somehow made their way out of my bag and onto the crummy floor.
I dropped it just in time. It wasn’t premeditated. Maybe for God it was, but not for me. He bends to help - the Scent of a Man. Shite. I know him. My phermones must’ve blinded me temporarily. How could I miss him?
It doesn’t take much time for his cologne, the aquiline nose and his broad palms to jog my memory.
I ‘ve met him before. Another day, equally crowded and even more noisy environs. His cut glass accent, his crinkly eyes, his unusually gorgeous name. A should’ve been wedged in my recollection forever. Forever.
He recognizes me immediately. So it wasn’t as coincidental as it seemed.
He was the first of all the firsts. The definition or antithesis. He is the original wildchild, the first moonbeam on a raindrenched night, the gentle rustling through the majestic Euclyptus maze. The kind of boy who deserved sonnets and also knew what the word meant. He was just about as calm as an ocean at high tide. There was a sense of un-belonging to him. Like he didn’t want to be here or for that matter, anywhere. A ready messiah who detested the fan following his words, his thoughts and his deeds garnered him.
This is so far back in the past, Madonna was probably dabbling with bestiality and S-n-M and..well..actually that analogy makes it seem more recent!
As they say in Clichetown, history repeats itself.
I had known of him and about him. His is definitely twisted, likes gazing into the eye of a hurricane. The boy was mad. Really. None like him was ever discovered or even invented. He did the doing, said the saying and bore the brunt of being the  resident devil. Diablo. His heritage was as muddled as mine and his desires were as cocoa and alluring as mine. But he was notch higher.
He was the owner of a mind so uniquely brilliant. His honey dipped smile and cognac eyes made him even more irresistible.
But the question remained.
Who was he?
The wonderkid who could churn answers to cryptic mathematical puzzles faster than you could say Big Blue. Or, the recluse who sometimes went on without smiling for months but every time he did, the perfection of his smile could’ve left a million gasping for breath even in an Oxygen bar!
This boy was definitely twisted. A part and apart. Sometimes an escapist. He was the only one who seemed about 10 times as screwed up as I was when we were 13.
Then he ran away. From a home that was supposed to shelter him but ended up as his own mental asylum. He couldn’t handle his mind, thats what Sister Frances had said.
We heard of him and then about him. He was in Germany, El Salvador, Manila, Florida. He was an escort, a writer, a photographer, a sportstar, a junkie, a lunatic.
My first Muse was looking right into my eye and I was as unprepared for this as I generally am for everything else.
I had once taken his picture. Some hobby class et al. His eyes were remarkable. Still are.
It was one if the first virtuoso experiments ever conducted by yours truly. The fact that I subsequently lost the film and any designs I might’ve had on him is a different beast altogether and should be tackled a different day.
These postmodern Davids are prickly and priceless. I have encountered and entertained plenty(even as I was being entertained by them). This realm of life has never been exposed to sufficient light. Fear of destruction. A photographer’s natural phobia.
But here he was. Flesh and Blood, Again.
My mental horses galloping faster than you could say “Wyoming”.
He asks, ever so placidly – “Schezi?”..”Wow…You didn’t manage to grow cheekbones ..did ya?”
Hope sank faster than a 80 tonne iron plank attached to a dead whale.
“Not really. But Rogue..err..Vogue predicts a return to round faces this season” – Humor is not my calling card. Clearly.
“Going or coming?”
“Actually…I don’t know.” Note to self - nervous laughter doesn’t work. Ever. Not at client visits and definitely not while slobbering all over self when in the company of a really hot and really old friend.

“I am in town for a week ..lets swap numbers and maybe I can call you “

Really??..(whatthefuckareyouthinking)
“Sure”.
After effects of positive phraseology and the obscence number of employee development sessions.
Numbers exchanged. Fear builds small sweat puddles in the cab on my way back.
Am I fucking stupid?
He texts. Why did I run away? Meet him for some obligatory mid meal snack typa thing?
Yes. Of course.
Such stupidity is replete and so in sync with itself. Chain reaction silliness.
We agree upon a venue and a suitably clandestine hour. Vodka crates usually come handy at times like these. A bottle of gin is equally helpful.
We settle for the original drug. Cafeine.
The reflection is afloat. Stiller than the silence of obscurity. We mumble nothings about precedent and the current and the imminent. He loves my hair and thinks that insists that I must be related to Thandie Newton. Doesn’t forget taking jibes at my hyper-ventilating ex-self.
I nod, submissively. Hard candy. Indeed.
We participate in 13 conversations about nothing in particular. Then the unthinkable happens. He wants to take pictures. Of me. Did I mention that 4 hours and 2 locations past, he is now curiously placed between a four-poster bed and the dubious davenport that splits the suite into two beings.
Will we or Won’t we??
“We will now shoot”. He decrees.
He wants candid capture.
Do anything. Or don’t do anything.
Don’t pose.
This is role reversal. This time its him wanting to peer into my soul through his Canon Digital Rebel.

I wiggle my nose at the thought of his whole Turntable Muse and focus my attention on a peckish raven peering inside the loft. He continues to pace restlessly.

“I want to shoot frames. I want to see your eyes.”
“One of em is glass and the other belonged to me pet pig. Nothing incredible, you see.”
“Sanch..Look at me straight.”
The voice is laiden with intensity only he can manage. He is serious coz otherwise he would have stuck to variations of my first name and not jumped onto my second.

“Magnifique!” He mumbles.
Before I know, he is holding the hour captive. This leica lover.
I couldn’t ask for more. The outline falls into place.

“What do you do these days?”
“I watch people.”
“Continue with the glibness and I leave.”
“Photography.”
“Really…how did that happen?”
“You did it.”

Blank couldn’t be blank-er.
“You took a picture of me at school….I have it with me. You’d said that people can come and go but memories remain and everytime you take a picture you capture a little bit of that being’s life in the camera. Thats why you took pictures.”
“You remember that???”
“Forgetting it…You…wasn’t an option.”
“Stop…I might cry more than I did when I watched Steel Magnolias!”

Plonk!
A giant cushion lands an inch sideways to my right.

“You are such a trip”
Right back at ya.

I remember vividly when I first showed him the prints I had taken. He hated and critiqued each one of them. He was critical. Of my work and of me. Harsh. I hated that. My inner narcissisa could only handle so much. He had inspired vendetta and a certain indispensable will power within my unaffected psyche.

“Why do you still do it?” I question.
“Coz I get free tickets to places with names I still haven’t learnt to pronounce.” He retorts.
He can read my face.
“Also because unlike you I couldn’t choose from amongst a pen, a camera or a canvas. Because I found unparalleled beauty in commonplace Filipino hookers parading the low streets of Thailand. I do it because I couldn’t survive incessant rehabs coupled with constant medical collapses forever. I do it because I can go to Africa and for once feel grateful for my life and those with whom I share it. I do it because I am broken, bandaged and stapled on the inside. Coz I am falling apart. Every second of it. So, I find my liberation. I find my conscience in the confines of my camera and all that it sees. And this is it”

An unstable pause.
“I still hate the pictures, though” I pout.
Sure, you do.
“Oh! my callous Muse..” He winks.

Wow! 180 degrees and how!
We’ve exchanged places.

Just when I was being thankful for a divine disconnection pervading my senses the morning finds me with a hangover and no hubris.
This is how change affects. This was so reminiscent of a past I had just wrapped and flung into a faraway vault of Time. Except, the usual encumbrance of guilt that follows unforgivable (unfathomable) sex was nowhere in my ally.
There was the succinct displacement. Lust by Love. Love for the Art. His work. His life. Him. Any other day, this would have been a sorely wasted opportunity. Today, it was worth every ounce of rapture I had forsaken for rekindling an old passion.
Will He know about it?
No.
Will I feel the need to tell him?
Maybe.
Till then, the chaise longue must share this secure secret with me. The journey to becoming a sharp chronicler begins with this. A bottle of gin, a misplaced itinerary, a mediocre camera and a desire to come undone.
In ways more than one.

Post Party Interruption
4:05 am - Received: “The Vodafone kid looks like you. Plus she is 6 or 7. The same age as you were last b’day?!”
4:10 am - Sent: “The dog resembles you. And not in a cute way.”
4:15 am - Received: “I don’t want to leave but I have to. I’m coming back on the 19th. I want to see it through this time. I am already missing you. Your neurotic rambling mainly! Someday you will come around to appreciating Leibowitz just a lil more. The dog is adorable. Thanks!”
4:20 am - Sent: “Awww…Airports make you lose your mental balance, don’t they? Leibo-witch dont work for me Danny baba!”.
4:30 am - Received: “Did the fish swallow your tranquilizers again? Your tattoo should read A’s Z.
4:31 am - Received: “p.s.: I think I love you. Already sorry for how cheap that is going to sound when am less drunk and/or sleep deprived.”
Well. Not much to be said after that.