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Jack of all trades, master of none.....but I guess that is all it takes.

Saturday, September 19, 2015

how i remember you



The ink stains the paper, trying to carve into words my memory of you. It fails. The very words fail as the memories in their denial to be constrained and captured become fluid. Turning, convoluting, escaping, each one of them splits into a thousand songs of love and the ensuing chaos. The way smoke strings break into incomprehensible patterns. How does one tie up a thousand songs and write them into one?



I tell myself to stop but it brings a smile on my face. Things you said, experiences you transpired always had affected my writing and continue to do so even in your absence. It's ridiculous. But at least now it feels like you are around. I don't know why I suddenly found you in this continuous failure to write these memories. Memories apparently too holy for even body's nightly angst to trespass, too convoluted for even the imagination to fiddle with. Why is this you? But I do see why I failed in the first place. What desire and imagination could not do, what luck would the words have had, bound as they are in their histories of coinage, limited in their meanings and trapped in their past contexts...they had always been used to describe the more mundane of life. The life of the blanket one covers up with on cold nights. But remember, you are that coolness that I put out one leg out of the blanket to try and catch...the coolness that allows me to sleep in comfort of the warmth. The one that apparently makes me corny as the dung of a horse feeding in the corn farms but then again, I just used "horse dung"  as a metaphor. You would have laughed your guts out. 



As always the imagination refuses to be a guide in revisiting of my time with you. I try to translate the memory into a lustful recollection of our night, try to expel it, express it in the furor of my hands on my dick. But fail again, unable to recreate the feel of your body against mine, of the taste of your contours. Defeated, like I have been many a time before, I go to our sacrosanct history of messages spanning years. Years most of which were spent not even knowing how the other looked against the reality of the world, years of the playful imagination of what it would be to be us. I try to find something in those well preserved, digital words, that do not blot like mine do now, do not fail, for they had already won us our time together; trying to find something that would maybe render some sense to the madness that you are. And like those books that we unknowingly had come to love and live together, I find details in those messages, crumbs that I never thought existed. A subtle mention of a poem by the digital you, a few keystrokes and clicks post I find myself reading it:


…Till flesh must fade for heaven was here!—
Thus leant she and linger’d—joy and fear!
Thus lay she a moment on my breast.

Then we began to ride. My soul
smooth’d itself out, a long-cramp’d scroll
freshening and fluttering in the wind.
Past hopes already lay behind.
Had I said that, had I done this,
what need to strive with a life awry?

So might I gain, so might I miss.
Might she have loved me? just as well
she might have hated, who can tell!
Where had I been now if the worst befell?
And here we are riding, she and I.


I have tried to recall many a time and yet it doesn't feel right...this cheap re-imagination of your tongue on mine. 
And I realize I have started writing prose in rhyme. 

Time, right, mine, rhyme. Reminds me of something I read in one of those Virginia Woolf's books. Something about how amazing the times would have been when people spoke in rhymes, hummed them in their luncheons.


There has fallen a splendid tear
From the passion-flower at the gate.
She is coming, my dove, my dear;
She is coming, my life, my fate;
The red rose cries, ‘She is near, she is near’;
And the white rose weeps, ‘She is late’;
The larkspur listens, ‘I hear, I hear’;
And the lily whispers, ‘I wait.’


That's the poem she had referred to and there it was, a reference to lily. Even here I find dredges of you winking at me. You were right when you said you don't need me to be there to find me. 


You do realize I am writing this for you more than for the people out there but unlike you, they are reading this. So I am going to tell them what I realized about why I constantly fail in my remembrance of you. Words define, they describe; memories re-create what has already been created. Neither has the power to recreate chaos of the moments we had spent together when one tiny decision, one turn of the lane, lead to entirely unexpected nights. That fighting with the darkness to see the details of your eyes, the touch of your body and the unexplored odours and textures. The air thick and hazy with uncertainties, buzzing with possibilities. No remembering will allow for reliving that, remembrances are too clear, too deterministic, the cause and the effects too known. It's time I stop pitting them against each other- words and memories against what emerges when we meet. Far too much ink has been wasted in the attempt, rain forests sacrificed one ball of paper at a time. Blotted and then rejected in their inability and incompetence. The mere idea of you is moving, it's changed by the time a sentence reaches its period. Of course, the words fail in their static dictionary meanings. Of course, the memories fail in their limited knowledge of what transpired. I resort then to just describing the failure of the attempt for it is still the same. Still a failure and still drenched in its want for you.   

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