An Irony

The mother's favourite colour is white.

D.

Gently I laid my fingers on his chest. Gently I pushed him away. He looked at me, puzzled. What’s wrong, he asked. If we have to do this, you have to know what I want, I said. It seems just to me this way.

Just to whom?

To both of us.

When I left I did not look back. I left the door as it was, for it didn’t seem vital to close it all the way.

This was the room I entered in my dreams. It was the library, or so it seemed: shelves of books lining the walls from floor to ceiling. Old books, it seemed, smells of age and dust, gathering, swirling. I inhaled the air, tasting oblivion, which clung. He would be waiting, seated in the ancient armchair, uniformed and ready. At the strike of his whip I would leap on to the floor, roll my nakedness against the carpet, rub against it, as if it were a raiment of shame. Blood was to be exacted; shame had to split, that was the point. And yet, it was shame, and I the embodiment of shame: he required of me devotion to purge.  

Thoughts #2

Soul is chemical; anima the workings of firing neurons and chemicals.  Consciousness slides inside us, fluids. We are channels of consciousness. 

Thoughts

To what end does one privilege meaning over meaninglessness? Is that even possible? What is the nature of meaning? One desires. One begins there. The old adage: "Know Thyself".

H. and B.

He slings off the back-pack, sits down on the edge of his bed. Stillness invades his body. Then he bends forward, fingers twisting into the black knots. Like a chemist mindful of danger, he slowly unlaces his boots. Loosened and shaken off, the boots lie like dormant insults; the floor the carpeted flat of his consciousness, pressed down by the leathered, mud-speckled anticipation of mockery. That he takes hold of the mouths and flings the boots across the room surprised him only revealed the depth of his bottled-up emotions, a turbid mixture of rage and self-accusation. Something shattered. He does not raise his head, hearing the sounds, which can only be glass. His eyes remain fixed on the unshifting image in his mind: H. and B., commissioned officers of the Singapore Armed Forces, leaders of men, locked in an embrace, shirtless, skin slick with the sweat of their midnight run, blissfully ignorant of the presence of a third soul, a witness to the communion, though fearful and guilt-ridden, wary of entering the shower where the company of two were already in the throes of preparation, as if stepping in would be a confession, a risk for which he is yet prepared.

A.

My hands were already reaching for the phone when the thought caught hold of the implications: this is foolishness, the mind said. Weak fingers grasping air, nerves tight under skin, and the phone remained untouched, gleaming coldly. What did he tell you before he left? The mind – preachy creature, alert as ever to the fallibility of its human host – asserted its case, this time with a question. Holding down defiance, I answered – a complying, cooperative witness: he said he would be unreachable over the week. Why is that? He is at sea. And? No mobile connection. Wait – what about the Internet? What about the Internet…? Time and tide wait for no man – isn’t there something you want to tell him, something urgent, that can’t be delayed lest your mind unravels? You are not unraveling, it seems. What you see can be deceiving. I trust you. That is not the question – the question is, do you trust him, do you trust yourself with him? That is two. Well, two then.

Observations

There is this elderly woman whom I would occasionally encounter on my morning jogs. Pushing a wheelchair in front of her, slowly, more out of the limits of her constitution than a general tendency toward cautions, she appears to be also engaging in some form of morning exercise. From far away the wheelchair resembles a pram. As I approach - invariantly, we travel in opposite directions - the idea would correct itself: the pram becomes an empty wheelchair. A chill down my spine: I think of her dead husband, assuming she was married, that the marriage lasted.