:: Arrows ::

You. Playing games suits us, because it gives away nothing, takes away nothing, and it makes light of everything. When you call―when the electric tension between us cackles along with the spit-fire song of long distance static―it reduces us to puppets stringing lines for show. When you write―when the few sentences of vacuous intimacy become lines of lies―it hurts the honesty I try so hard to retain, for myself, selfishly, if not for both of us.

We can't win this game. I'm not poker-faced enough, and your cards have long been tossed―open-faced and grinning with mirthless menace―onto the table long before. I'm not stupid enough to ask what exactly we're doing, and I'm not smart enough to want this to stop. And because I cannot romanticise concepts, I conceptualise romance. You are a concept, and so am I. Stay close, in the distance.

***

It still baffles me that the pop-culture reality of Cupid is that of a cherubic prepubescent, winged and curled, ready to chuckle with childish satisfaction each time he lets an arrow of love fly into the unsuspecting back of a lovelorn mortal.

How laughable. Cupid, in my view, is really one of the most tragic characters in the plethora of Greek myths―he's the very mirror of our humanly delusions when it comes to love.

Cupid, the god of love, was the son of Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty. Beauty mothered Love, as it were, thus giving birth to an intrinsic understanding that love cannot survive―cannot be―without beauty.

Cupid's calling was to unite men and women in love. His weapon, oddly enough, wasn't was beatific as his calling. No―Cupid didn't sprinkle lavander-coloured potions or cast dreamy spells of enchantment. He shot arrows―arrows; weapons of war, meant to pierce, made to kill. Such a delicious twist of truth―they knew it long before. Love hurts. It draws blood and squanders life, and we wilt like December daisies in its power.

And since Cupid is doing the random shooting, aiming at us mortals with the languid wisdom accorded only to the gods, it renders us―his victims―completely blameless. Our lack of responsibility when it comes to romance cannot be cussed, nor helped. This surrender of human spirit is so typical, so effortlessly selfish, that again, it makes me want to laugh.

But what do I know. One phone call, and I buckle.

***

'And she bolted for the window; her family couldn't stop her. She jumped to her death―22 storeys. Her torso was broken by the impact of landing on the van. When we finally found her, her eyes have been punctured and we couldn't find her heel―she was like a doll, shattered into bits.'

It wasn't quite the conversation you'd expect over a Valentines' Day lunch, but since the commercialised glitz of the day is sticking to me like acrid sweat, I actually found suicide a more engaging topic.

'You're smiling,' I observed. H's eyes were serious, but a tinge of macabre humour was lurking on his lips.
'I've seen death so many times, in so many forms. I just don't know how to react anymore.' He said matter-of-factly.
'So you laugh it off.'
'Sometimes. I have to compose myself before I could tell the family. The Chinese van driver had parked his vehicle illegally because he wanted to buy 4D; in the end the woman died above his van. I couldn't get the irony of the situation out of my head. He prayed for divinity, and got answered with death. How funny.'

Of course, we didn't laugh; we drank our respective overpriced coffee concoctions and smiled in unison, the strangeness of our conversation adding to the strange dimension of our relationship.

Stranger with each day isn't it; stranger than strange.

I wish I could be sated with normalcy. These are my eternal failings―my need for the unspoken, my want for the intangible, and my fear for the fixed.