:: But not quite ::

Scarlet Hotel proved to be a wonderful lover. She's a provocative concoction―attractive in her lazy opulence, and attentive in her glitzy luxury. R and I―vexed by the lull in our respective existence and troubled by our incessant need to run away―found ourselves in room 210 of the boutique hotel, grinning with girlish cheer.

We flicked on the DVD and ate grapes with dark chocolate. We paused SJP and her posse every time a gem came sparkling up in our conversation. We talked and laughed and made plans with hopeful neglect―New York, our book, 1929 and a tea-house date with my mother.

Yes, we have our myriad of responsibilities. Yes, we're chained and bound and gagged by expectations and fears. Yes, we're trying to reconcile the cancerous disease of youth―the malignant tumour rooted in our selfish want for gratification. But because our usual routines have been broken by two days of self-indulgence―good food, great conversation and irreplaceable companionship―I can't help but to bring the wings of fancy out of my thought closet and dust them out with care. I want a change―and like a spoilt child crying wolf―I want it now.

***

But Not Quite

A chasm, but not quite, you said.
A little colder―an emotional frostbite;
A little further―a rift of tears―despite
My best to slash my face with a smile.

You're sad, but not quite, you said.
For my inability―disability to feel;
For my weak, bleak strength in bid to heal
And my light is numbed from a dead circuit.

You're close, but not quite, you said.
I cannot be breached―reached, I'm far;
I have drifted, swept to ashes, my star
Had burnt me, torched me out of graceful orbit.

I'm sorry, but not quite.
I have no anger, nor spite―
I have only the ghost of a previous heart beat
Gently slowing down; no light, nor heat,
To force its blood to glow―I'm low―and dead.

But I smile anyway.

***

Melancholy does not become me. I blame it on the hormonal swing of womanhood. I wish I'm immune to the psychological manifestations of my physical self, but I'm sadly powerless. I have to content myself with the monthly stranger that falls off the edge of reason, and I have to pacify her craving for dark chocolates and freshly-baked bread with a fuck-the-carbs vengeance.

Last night, after the high of my Scarlet weekend, I sank to a peculiar new low. Something had dislodged from me. I felt as though a cosmic explosion had gone off inside; I was a dead galaxy. T's happy smile lost its energy after ten minutes of sitting with me―I couldn't participate and I couldn't care. I just…couldn't.

'Your eyes are dead,' he said with genuine worry.
My smile, as it turns out, was a sleet of plastic glee. A curtain of black depression was draping over me, its musky velvet prison welcomed by my lonely heartbeat. And I am lonely―in the purest sense of the word―lonely not for the absence, but the lost of a presence.

Maybe I'm just playing with words―a dangerous game of linguistic delusion. Perhaps the degrees of differences in using this word or that―this phrase or that―are negligible. They all point to the same end; I'm merely wearing my writer's blindfold as a shield against the obvious.

But darkness is the absence of light. I need to get out of my eclipse―and I will.