This Time Next Year

I believe all my inspiration comes from insomnia, in case you belong to an earlier time, you must not be aware of this term.

So, one of these mornings, after a dead-pan sleepless night of maximum brain activity, I had called up a friend to ask him, if it were ever possible for me to become a writer. He had answered with all positivity, he had faith in my talent, but first you have to make sure your book sells, how do you do that? I did ask. You need to write a love story, anything, you have to make sure it’s got ‘love’ in it, don’t make it intellectual. No body digs that.  

So basically he would tell me to maturely ape some of the keen writers of our generations who talk about their bruised broken dreams and breaking up and patching up and doing it on a SUV.

Hush, I would tell myself. Me who has a big opinion of himself couldn’t possibly abase his sacred hobby, to write something like that. If I weren’t a hypocrite I would have let it go, but where would I be without opinions, so I should call such books degrading. I had my own opinions of love, not very platonic though, but nevertheless a moderate dose of literature does make you a little insane, in the rain.

But I always had faith in my friend’s acuity. Well what are friends for anyway, if you do not have faith in their senses?

So I had to write a love story, if I had any chance of being a writer, I had to move people, with the single most abstract feeling in the world, the feeling of love, conveyed through words. But how do a layman who had never felt the kind of love that moved our generation, write about love?

And there in lay my challenge, everything that I would write about love, would be a lie, not a true story, so why would my story sell? But aren't stories about such imaginary lies?  

Do lies sell? But I have to listen to my friend.

So how do I feel about love? Well, I don’t know. But I think after I write down the story, I might know how I feel about it, so cometh the next paragraph a love story shall begin. I don’t know if it would come out right though.  

I hope it does.

I hope my friend likes it.

I met her on the stairs, I slipped two steps, and stumbled in front of her, she had a pale brown face, and brown little eyes, and she could carry her long hair in perfect synchrony with her austere self.

I thought she was beautiful, like many other men had thought at different times. Yes, physical beauty moved me.

Pulchritude. Abundant Pulchritude.

Her funny collar-bones. Like oars in a boat.

What if, what we think as beautiful were ugly in another planet? One mustn’t intellectualize love stories.

So there we had met, on the stairs, as if life could only go up or down from there, like life would never be standstill, like there could be fall. There should be fall.

She had smiled at me. Mannerisms had followed. Mannerisms of our generation.

Exchanging cell-phone numbers.Smooth.

Small talk.Smooth.

It should be followed by a first unofficial date, on the way back home, signifying nothing. The prospect of love is always god-damn easy for the romantics. It’s the real-love that they miss out at times. But then again, one mustn’t philosophize love stories.

You leave it for the sad stories.

So it had continued, a coy love-affair, one could suspect, of un-uttered sentiments, burning gently in the glory of rainy days. Oh the beautiful cloudy sky, the humid gentle breeze, the company of a beautiful woman, and the prospect of love, amorous days they were, right?

 In the world of fleeting moments every second is your present, and a second ago your immediate past. The whim of ‘time’-our great healer is that, it often spoils what it heals. It heals you by spoiling your memories.

Yes. That’s what it does.

So I do not remember how the dynamics changed or what was it that changed it all one day, or how she got lost, and how I couldn’t find her, or if she ever loved me, or if it were growing up games that we played, if it were fun?

I wish I had kissed her though one of those fine days.

But how often do life turns out how we imagine it? But since I am imagining it on the first place, I may have kissed her alright.  

Not then though, she had gone too far away, but years later, after we had lost our lovers, sons, and daughters, and had found each other on the bookshelves of our imagination.  

So I guess; I feel strongly about a weird kind of love after all. I guess I am too sappy and needy, spoilt in a world of abundant suffering. And I whine because I have never had a real shot at love, the kind of love that exists in this world between men and women, that I have to imagine some human equivalence through words to overcome my innate loneliness, but it’s alright I tell myself.

I would repeat, it’s alright.

My friend would read my story and he would say that I am awkwardly mushy, that it won’t sell, that it’s full of pseudo-intellectual generalisations, and no break-ups and patch-ups, but speculations.

I would know then that I wouldn’t have any chance at being a writer, but at least I will be happy knowing that if I have to live in this world, it would be for a kind of love that I would believe in, I think, the one like those great surges that engulfs you and takes you on the other side in a flash and you really don’t understand what it was all about.

Like one could always smile and utter,

‘what the fuck was that?’

And that’s why I will conform to this world for the time being.

Because, I know you live in this world and you will always understand this much.

For you.