INFINITY OF SIGHS, RISING TIDES

ALL WE DO IS HIDE, ALL WE DID WAS HIDE. - Me.

 Dear you,

I was prepared for the preordained status of this letter as a rhetorical statement for my benefit than yours.

You remember all ‘those times’ when all you want for yourself is an Advil and sleep. (In that order) The day that marked your vanishing act till this day, have been ‘those times’.

 That ‘swell’ time when we rode the carousel with Graham Nash blasting our eardrums, telling us that, “The entire world was love” and, we sang along till our throats were parched for another shot from our ‘secret’ whiskey flask.

You had forced me to take up that ‘stupid’ job at the banned books club, enunciating every sentence from their beat up pamphlet. “Don’t sweat it, Woolfy”, you’d told me in the waiting room, before ruffling my hair (it took me an hour to look like that). And you popped a cigarette, your feet tapping with nervous energy. You were bad at faking it.

I force myself to remember the times before you had ever existed in my universe, before you dismantled my ‘guarded and cagey emotional-fortress’, as you called it. It’s like seeing through tar, everything glistening with a vortex of a technicolor on bitter charcoal.

Do you remember the playlist you had compiled over the long and bitter winter? The one you’d titled, “Black hole of a heart”, I’d burst into a riot of a million ugly chuckles and you’d whispered, and I heard, “mission accomplished”. We spent the whole night talking about the man on the moon with the playlist on its hundredth loop and the water sprinklers in the morning couldn’t erase the quiet understanding we felt in our hearts. ‘Simple’ is a foreign word for me now.

When you left for Dublin and sent me pictures of the Book of Kells .I recall you calling me on New Year’s and slurring with all the alcohol in your veins, “I put you before Art”, as clearly as my volition to keep you in my heart for as long as I shall live.

 I can imagine you daydreaming about a certain colour that’s gotten you into a trance, beckoning you to jog back to your studio and immerse the canvas in it. You, sitting in a coffee shop with a friend (whom I don’t know); sketching the face of the attractive waitress on a paper napkin, I just hope you don’t give it to her.

You always had that old-world charm about you, you know? The ink black,  long hair- always in an unmanageable mess. The ocher-brown irises under those hooded eyes which were always in a state of contemplation, those lips that seemed to always be smirking at an inside joke. You looked the part too, the Art major with the silver easel. But I realised belatedly that, I wasn’t your Art.

WE wished, we wished but all we did was hide. Hide from what we truly felt and meant. I know I’d be the moth around your flame, the 70’s never left me; the hopeful believer in the goodness of Love. I would quote Byron and you’d be the Eliot. You were the black hole that blinded my world and hurled me into the raging whirlpools of the hollow land, the real one. I used to tell you that it isn’t love if doesn’t feel like the 70’s and you’d quote Erich Segal and I was naive enough to think that a Love like ours was meant for movie screens.
We kept running in circles, always shy of the horizon, where we would actually meet. We never realised what we truly were, we never ventured to explore.

You hid behind your Artistic freedom that dictated you to disconnect from fixation of the romantic kind; you were a traveler, a vanishing act. I was the dreamer who stood on the horizon, waiting for you to join me and watch us become. I hid in the waiting, all the illusions slowly dissipating into an inferno of flames, until there was only me and the burning sky, so much for becoming.

I have lost too much love to fear, doubt and distrust. So I offer you a final secret: my hiding place.

I wrote this, not in hopes of finding a riposte but, to finally find a restful slumber in knowing that I can finally come out of hiding.

With hope at last

-Me.

P.S.  I woke up from my seemingly indefinite Odin sleep. I wrote this while listening to daughter and Nada Surf. I have been neglectful. Sorry. You guys are Love. And Love should be treasured. This equals to a Peace offering?