The ink stains the paper, trying to carve into words my memory of you. It
fails. The very words fail as the memories in their denial to be constrained
and captured become fluid. Turning, convoluting, escaping, each one of them
splits into a thousand songs of love and the ensuing chaos. The way smoke strings
break into incomprehensible patterns. How does one tie up a thousand songs and
write them into one?
I tell myself to stop but it brings a smile on my face. Things you
said, experiences you transpired always had affected my writing and
continue to do so even in your absence. It's ridiculous. But at least now
it feels like you are around. I don't know why I suddenly found you in
this continuous failure to write these memories. Memories apparently too holy
for even body's nightly angst to trespass, too convoluted for even the
imagination to fiddle with. Why is this you? But I do see why I failed in
the first place. What desire and imagination could not do, what
luck would the words have had, bound as they are in their histories of coinage,
limited in their meanings and trapped in their past contexts...they had always
been used to describe the more mundane of life. The life of the blanket one
covers up with on cold nights. But remember, you are that coolness that I put
out one leg out of the blanket to try and catch...the coolness that allows me
to sleep in comfort of the warmth. The one that apparently makes me corny as
the dung of a horse feeding in the corn farms but then again, I just used
"horse dung" as a metaphor. You would have laughed your guts
out.
As always
the imagination refuses to be a guide in revisiting of my time with you. I try
to translate the memory into a lustful recollection of our night, try to expel
it, express it in the furor of my hands
on my dick. But fail again, unable to recreate the feel of your body against
mine, of the taste of your contours. Defeated, like I have been many a time
before, I go to our sacrosanct history of messages spanning years. Years most
of which were spent not even knowing how the other looked against the reality
of the world, years of the playful
imagination of what it would be to be us. I try to find something in those well
preserved, digital words, that do not blot
like mine do now, do not fail, for they had already won us our time together;
trying to find something that would maybe render some sense to the madness that
you are. And like those books that we unknowingly had come to love and live
together, I find details in those messages, crumbs that I never thought
existed. A subtle mention of a poem by the digital you, a few keystrokes and
clicks post I find myself reading it:
…Till flesh must fade for heaven was here!—
Thus leant she and linger’d—joy
and fear!
Thus lay she a moment on my
breast.
Then we began to ride. My soul
smooth’d itself
out, a long-cramp’d scroll
freshening and fluttering in the
wind.
Past hopes already lay behind.
Had I said that, had I done this,
what need to strive with a life awry?
So might I gain, so might I miss.
Might she have loved me? just as
well
she might have hated, who can
tell!
Where had I been now if the worst
befell?
And here we are riding, she and
I.
I have
tried to recall many a time and yet it doesn't feel right...this cheap
re-imagination of your tongue on mine.
And I realize I have started writing prose in
rhyme.
Time,
right, mine, rhyme. Reminds me of something I read in one of those Virginia Woolf's
books. Something about how amazing the times would have been when people spoke
in rhymes, hummed them in their luncheons.
There has
fallen a splendid tear
From the
passion-flower at the gate.
She is
coming, my dove, my dear;
She is
coming, my life, my fate;
The red
rose cries, ‘She is near, she is near’;
And the
white rose weeps, ‘She is late’;
The
larkspur listens, ‘I hear, I hear’;
And the
lily whispers, ‘I wait.’
That's the
poem she had referred to and there it was, a reference to lily. Even here I
find dredges of you winking at me. You were right when you said
you don't need me to be there to find me.
You do realize I am writing this for you more than for the people out
there but unlike you, they are reading
this. So I am going to tell them what I realized
about why I constantly fail in my remembrance of you. Words define, they
describe; memories re-create what has already been created.
Neither has the power to recreate chaos of the moments we had spent
together when one tiny decision, one turn of the
lane, lead to entirely unexpected nights.
That fighting with the darkness to see the details of your eyes, the touch of
your body and the unexplored odours and
textures. The air thick and hazy with uncertainties, buzzing with
possibilities. No remembering will allow for reliving
that, remembrances are too clear, too deterministic, the
cause and the effects too known. It's time I stop pitting them
against each other- words and memories against what emerges when we meet. Far
too much ink has been wasted in the attempt, rain forests sacrificed one ball
of paper at a time. Blotted and then rejected in their inability and
incompetence. The mere idea of you is moving, it's changed by the time
a sentence reaches its period. Of course,
the words fail in their static dictionary meanings. Of course, the memories fail in their limited knowledge of what
transpired. I resort then to just describing the failure of the attempt for it
is still the same. Still a failure and still drenched in its want for you.
