Hedonism

Such a night! M was her usual vision of vivacity―big curls, big smile, and big eyes filled with that liquid vulnerability. I was all colours and cabana, deviant in my determination to wring every libertine moment out of Saturday―and there's no one better to do it with than M.

Dinner was a sinful hour of pinot and pizza, the news of her newly-single status as much a shock to my system as the red wine was. 'That's how it is―you gave your heart, your mind, your body. The only thing you hope you can keep when all that is over is your own sanity,' M quipped, her expression so set in neutrality that even my perceptiveness drew a quick, quiet blank.

The sudden wash of rain added that certain noir mood; they played Eros Ramazzotti, we topped up our wine and shared a slice of Valrhona torte in homage to hedonism. 'I feel like dancing,' M declared, just as I tipped the bottle and found it dry. I flashed her a wicked smile. 'Flings,' I said in a conspiratorial whisper as we walked out of the pizza bar into the mist of rain, 'are made in, and for, moments like these.'

An hour later, C and his friend were standing dutifully where I said we could meet. C's blue-eyed friend is blonder, stockier, older, but they share the same name and a similar cavalier charm. C's eyes dimmed with casual tenderness as he pulled me into a knowing embrace. 'It's been too long, my dear Jean,' he said, not bothering to whisper, unceremonious with his candor.

'You owe me,' I muttered into his collarbone, a mush of unpolished sentiment against his warmth. We separated long enough to make the necessary introductions, and after the first round of drinks and some rowdy, raucous dancing, there was no better personification of youth's extravagance than the four of us. M, slinking her body around her newfound friend; C, twirling me to the tunes that had been the anthem to our parents' time; M, wrapping her arms around me as the boys smoked; C, quietly kissing me in open discretion.

I say without irony that despite our debauched, decadent behaviour, there was a certain innocence to that sort of uninhibition. There was no dilemma, no need for moral sancity, no thought for consequence, no pretense, no greater authority that could red-tape us into conditioned submission. We were four very young people, each with our own histories and burdens and lusts, each filled with different ambitions and fights and fears, and all teeming with mindless energy, because the sum of all our yesterdays could not yet paint the dawn for a circumscribed tomorrow. Our youth, for the moment, was witless, sightless, and reckless. It made us―clichéd as this sounds in my current sobriety―free.

As I began the feel the first wave of giddiness―from the drinks, from the thumping beats, from the smoke, from C's cologne―he held me firmly in that long-limbed embrace that spoke of our strange familiarity, of his careless intimacy, and of the hedonistic nature I know I've always had, and would never really outgrow of. My smoky, sordid, oblivious self―fitting, then, that she is only known to, and loved by, her callous, self-indulgent Adonis. United by the tempting, tempestuous knowledge of our nameless connection, we were like Bonnie and Clyde, armed with irrationality, and ready to rob the night of any pleasure it could provide.

As I watched the four of us leave the club, M with her C, and I with mine, I was lavishly comforted by the thought of how our heartaches and struggles, like Saturday nights, do not last forever. The elasticity of our emotions, perhaps, is the most rewarding of all the pleasures youth is kind enough to dispense.

To my muse

Mother what I could never tell you
about all those mad verses beating in my eyes
or the bitter battles of sirens and faithless lovers
and their careless flights. This is my tempestuous season -

Mother what I could never tell you
about my melancholy journaled in yesterdays' wings
or my punishing fear of your mortality, reminding me
of how my angry hunger will one day stop its treason -

Mother what I could never tell you
about the simple joy of showing you my broken skin, joy
in the knowledge that your blood is thinned into mine
such that I could never bleed again with your blessing -

Mother what I could never tell you
I think you already know; you are not nearly human
You would humbly disagree, but I knew from years ago
You are not just my mother, but an angel in mortal dressing.

Bias

Saturday. Night was a few hours away.

I was excited because I was going to meet M. It wasn't that kind of lavish, longing sort of excitment―that I reserve for you―but it was an uncomplicated sense of anticipation. M. One of the most heterosexual women I know―she loves her men―and because of that, I could never understand how we often manage to call up offbeat and erotic innuendos―with each other.

There is no woman-to-woman jealousy between us: I sense a natural, sated attraction instead, more sensual than sexual, an attraction that we use to galvanise our friendship, which is categorically different from the familiar warmth I share with my girls, or the deep, comfortable attachment I have for René.

Perhaps it is that quality she has―one that eludes simple definition―a certain nostalgia for the fallacious paradise, a tempestuous child-woman perseity; she's free but fangled, neither young nor old, at once naive and wise. It's a quality that I recognise and most likely possess, in varying degrees of similiarities. We gravitate towards tragedy: more Atremis than Aphrodite. We delight in our flaws. We are incurable romantics and recovering addicts.

Perhaps it is the shared misery in loving our distant men, the sisterhood of having lost faith and babies and dreams seaming up the hearts we had once worn on our sleeves. Now we bind these hearts into secret scrapbooks and pocket journals, hearts that we trade and share over cheap red wine and the cheaper recounting of the origins that have both bruised and blessed us.

I'm always thankful for our candor and our liberty―we've told things to each other that will never see light of day in the hours of our sobriety. That sort of artless honesty―never to a lover, seldom to a friend, but often to those we see as our alter egos.

I am protective of M; she has a fraility that even she does not appreciate. Her midnight eyes are lighter than mine, and her smile is as frank as a child's. She can be unexpectedly tender towards me: an understanding of the presence of my gordian complex, I suppose, if not of my complex itself.

She was two hours late, but I did not blame her; only got anxious because I feared for her safety. My mom is sick but I have to see you. I understoood. Sat like a statue and nursed my wine―and of course I was thinking of you, of the martini dusk last Saturday, of how my hands fit perfectly with yours―while leafing through magazines that I could not clear my head enough to read.

She turned up, suddenly, a vortex of energy, her black t-shirt and satin pants hugging her lanky frame, loose curls in a bun, a cluster of jade and beads around her neck. Her face was free of make-up; she smelled of soap and jasmine. We embraced and kissed, and I was aware she looked me over the way a man would a woman. ('I'm with a really hot chick,' she later cooed to her brother on the phone, smiling pointedly, knowingly, at me, a perennial flirt, always burning, always simmering, with that fire.)

We got the wine. We tucked into our cakes. We held hands, touched knees: your usual girlfriends, now getting slightly drunk, peppering our conversation with hushed whispers and loud giggles. She had a way of throwing her head back when she laughed, exposing her throat; I held my wine glass like an aristocrat, and grinned like a minx to the two young waiters serving us.

She dreams of Italy, with the Tuscan sunshine and a pleasant, temperate existence, free from the chains that have decreed her so far. Maybe her own vineyard, a man: no one to tell her what a good Indian girl should be doing, no cultural baggage to cuff herself to, no family honour to answer for. In her own way M is as much of a free-spirit as I am, maybe even more. She loves the risk of risk, and my bohemian sentiment finds a kindred soul in her want to run, to be a child of the world:

'Otherwise, what? You go to school, get a degree, find a job, support your parents, marry some guy, pop out some kids, pay the government, and then you die.' Was M's unpoetic but succinct summary at our immediate prospects.

And then, training those eyes―those eyes, liquid with hope―onto me: 'Jean, we should just do it. Let's start with a trip. A getaway. Get away from this.' She searched my face, brushing the stray strands of hair out of my eyes with her quick, boyish fingers: such a child! Is this what you see when you are with me, dear heart? When you cradle my face and call me a child―this? The cocktail of sequestered hope and a muddle of sadness and fear?

I smiled at her, suddenly a mother, a man, the protector, for which you lie, because you know―'Of course we will.' She seemed satisfied and her expression became piquant, as she sat back and dreamt of cobblestone streets and colourful flea markets, nights of Brunello and Bolgheri, and days flavoured with society and song.

Maugham had branded the notion of La Vie Boheme vulgar before―an ill-written fancy, a mean, mediocre promise, a worthless lie spun to seduce the restlessness of youth. With M I see now that for so many of us, life is nothing more than a bargin-counter, with our catchpenny dreams and two-bit ambitions. La Vie Boheme is our drugstore guarantee, a sort of an insurance, a vaquished hope, for the something other than this.

I took her by the hand and we poured our turbulent, efficacious spirits onto the smoky dancefloor. She draped her arms around me, shutting out the madness and the men, and our circle of sisterhood was now swiftly, sweetly, complete.

Guardian

The small horror of watching your father undress in front of you, one painful button by one painful button, as he struggles to get his 'bad arm' out of a stubborn sleeve―the small horror grows, because you have nowhere else to look, nowhere else to be, that at 9.58 a.m. this Tuesday morning, one random April of yet another random year, this is where you ought to be, here, watching your father undress as he limps his way onto the therapist's couch.

The small horror grows. He is now half naked on the couch, lying with controlled tension, jaws clenched, eyes yellowed with anxiety, the stench of his discomfort stronger than that of herbs and Chinese medication drafting around us. I sit ramrod straight on the stool; there is nowhere else to look, nothing else to see except this: I wish I could melt into the white-washed walls. Like an animal, I think miserably, seeing how naked and vulnerable my father suddenly is. Like a dog at the vet's office, eyes wide and staring and stark with confusion. But because he is human and my father, there is also enough embarrassment for the both of us.

'You see this,' says the massage therapist, who is working her nimble fingers into a particularly insipid expanse of flesh on my father's back, 'you see this? This is bad.' It takes a few moments for me to realise that she is talking to me―to me, as though her patient's condition has rendered him deaf, and he cannot hear us.

I nod obediently. This is bad. What a tone. Like someone buying a pound of pork or beef at the market, and upon realisation that the meat isn't fresh enough―this is bad. I cannot see my father's face anymore because he is lying face down. But a vein protrudes on his arm―close-fisted and heavy-hearted under the sheets, he must be in secret despair.

I am not sure what to say, where to look, how to pretend this is all okay. So I nod again, clutching my bag very close to my chest, as though agreeing with the therapist's assessment―this is bad―will somehow validate my cause here, today, in this little office, where my father is being stripped and worked on like a pound of meat.

Extirpate

You wanted to kill me. You―my executioner and my priest, administering the last rites with reluctant practice. You were the gentle guillotine, and my neck, feeble and emasculated, was your perfect platform.

You wanted to kill me, but my dear love―I have died for you so many nights before last night. I have killed off so many could-have-beens, so many lives, just so I could live this one out for you. For a few velvet-dressed hours, once every blue funk moon―for our cold fingers to meet, for our strangled desires to find their various anchors, for our eyes to search the desert of eternal regret sandstormed over our faces.

You said I wear the smile of a girl but the wounds of a woman. The smile is for your benefit, and the wounds―the wounds, nothing more or less than my unflagging heartbreaks punctuating themselves, over and over and over again, into the yearning skin of this love.

You said you keep your distance because it is better. Your distance. A circumspect, a contigent, a perilous balance between sadness and apathy. No peaks, nor valleys; no wax, nor wane. Just linear time, litigating your loyalities until my loneliness unravels, a ragged hem, begging for your herringbone stitches.

You said you could never make me happy, because you are too selfish, and I am too intelligent to suffer your trespass. And so whatever we share―whatever we are―nothing but a foster love, one that I care for until fate sends it back to its broken home. My hope is a stillborn, an eremitic.

You said all you that you wanted, all that your wary disarticulation would allow you to. You had one random tear for me. I had oceans. How could you kill me again―when I've been drowning myself all this while? Throw me your penny thoughts―coins minted for abuse. Toss them into me, like a wishing well. And listen as they break the surface, slicing into the depthless dark, little zodiacs of our dying friendship sinking into me. Listen, and make a wish upon my broken heart. A fallen star, a heart that has been asphyxiated: both small and bright and never meant.

I walked away from you, like the songs say I must do. And inside every refrain of my swansong lover, beats from this crippled heart lay paused. And within the cocoon of forbidden love, this butterfly life that flutters and calls up thunderstorms of muted longing curls up its wings and quietly dies.

If there is ever hope of a destination with you, it is a hope already maimed and mangled. With you, I'm travelling in a train, coaches driven by my dead. The scenery outside my broken window burns up the sky, their lonely branches bridging up my fragile seasons. I talk to the weather beaten trees, the ones that grow on roads that disappear, with birds that are already memories of the wind.

I walked away from you, but because I have yet to learn to migrate, I am back once again, in the quicksand of your lenient cruelty.