This story is pretty interesting, in that once I wrote it I found that I no longer have any desire to think, let alone write, about any of the ideas it brings up (especially the sentiment about a person being condensed into a paragraph). I'm glad I refrained from posting anything during the trip, because I can see things like this in a new (and not necessarily bad) light. One that perhaps makes me want to stop being so serious about everything.
It was sometime in the evening that he decided to turn up, late as usual. I could tell by the cautionary looks he was giving me that he was afraid of my temper, like most other people I knew. For whatever strange reason, there were certain things that I simply could not take, and being late was one of them. My mind was thrown back to one of the few times that I had actually blown up in public – the unfortunate victim being my sister, who was an hour or two late. As with most memories, only fragments come back to me. The beautiful green dress she was wearing. The way she looked at me as she was approaching, which was just the way he was looking at me now. The faceless mass of shocked (yet curious) onlookers. The way her tears streamed down her face, and how she buried it in her hands.
The expression quickly gave way to one of stifled relief, though, because he probably noticed the distant look on my face. He sheepishly extended his right arm to reveal a bottle of wine, in a child-like attempt to appease me. It took me a while to drift away from my sister all those years ago, and mumbled some sort of thanks to him as I accepted the bottle. I was unsure of what exactly to do or say at that instant, so I feigned an interested look at the bottle, putting on my best impression of a connoisseur. Through the corner of my eye, I could tell that he was happy that I did so, as though this validated him in some way. Yet, as it always goes, I had to ruin this potentially blissful moment by noticing the price-tag had not been removed. Curiosity got the better of me, and I stole a quick glance at the (very modest) price, and remarked to myself that I was obviously worth very little to him. Immediately, though, I felt guilty for thinking such a thing, and a wave of sympathy attempted to tide over the lingering doubts as to his true character. As the two mixed and left me with a bittersweet sense of contentment, I offered him a makeshift smile and a glass of his wine.
In truth, I was always interested as to how conversations could take off. One could start with some tidbit from the evening news and by the end of the evening start arguing over the nature of reality. Unfortunately for me, this interest proved to be quite a hindrance when I actually had to carry out a conversation myself. At every pause, I noticed that he would be able to draw in some related item of interest and breathe new life into the discussion. When it was my turn, though, more often that not I would stare at the coffee table and be forced to desperately think about something to say. This was borne out of the fact that my brain would be forever analysing the potential of every new topic I was going to introduce. Too many people mistook this for boredom, whereas in fact it was a cry for help. It always seemed to me that on the rare occasions that I did find something to say, the conversation would once again promptly fall to its feet. Once bitten… Worse still, at several points during his monologues, I would race back to the starter topic and marvel at how far we’d come, but consequently not pay attention to what was actually being said.
This time, though, I somehow managed to pull it off. There seemed to be no end to the things we could talk about, and I found myself actually enjoying talking (instead of just listening). We even got to the story I had gotten published in a magazine, a rare accomplishment for anyone in my (very limited) social circle. We even went over parts of the poem I had used to preface the work, which was perhaps the funniest thing I’d ever done.
“...
The countless days have ended,
As a new one blossoms green and blue,
He sits among books and drinks,
He asks why there is nothing to do.
The party’s over, the guests back in the cupboard,
He sits on the porch with one final whim,
Staring out, he imagines new friends
But no one imagines him
...”Like most of my accomplishments, as I had written it I thought it to be simply brilliant. But as he looked over it, I was paralysed with a fear that he would burst out laughing; indeed, in that moment of intense self-critique, I even began to imagine it to be the worst piece of writing I’d ever seen. His mere presence converted me into perhaps the harshest critic I’d ever face in my life, and I shredded apart the whole thing line by line. In a cold sweat, I made some self-disparaging remarks, clearly fishing for some sort of affirmation that it wasn’t all that bad. Naturally, he smiled and said it was really good. I should have expected he would; I knew him better than that. Still, I took the magazine and buried it under the pile of newspapers, making a mental note to throw it out tomorrow. I doubted that I could ever look at it again without being reminded of this moment.
As we got deeper into the night, we both noticed that the bottle was now empty. For such a cheap wine, it was surprisingly good. I told him so (naturally omitting the part about it being cheap), and I could sense a genuine sense of happiness on his part. So much so, that I began to wonder whether I was that hard to please. Normally I would dissect such things in my own head, presupposing various things of the people around me, but today was different. For starters, I had just finished half a bottle of wine by myself. With my courage fuelled, I took a deep breath, and asked him just what he, and others, thought of me. The answers surprised me.
Drowned in nostalgia and alcohol, the conversation flowed smoothly across an amazing number of topics, yet always coming back to what both of us loved – intellectual cotton-candy. What this night meant, whether some God was watching it, whether it would exist even under the bright Sun of noon next day, and whether any of it even mattered. It took me back many years, this conversation, and I could tell he felt the same way. For the first time in a long time, I saw him stand up and assume that wonderfully charming pose he always made when he was going to say something profound, and that a half-empty wine-glass should be in his left hand made it all the more fitting. He looked up towards the ceiling, as though addressing the ethereal spirits hovering over the room, and said in a melancholic tone: “I read the paper yesterday, as I do most days, but this time something in particular caught my eye. There was a write-up on a local resident who passed away, and the life he led, what a good human being he was, the family that loved him, what a hard-worker he was and how he helped his company grow. There was even a picture of him, obviously in much happier times…and then it struck me that I could become this man - my life reduced to a few paragraphs and choice quotes of relatives. And I said to myself that this must be the worst fate ever – the colossal nature of one’s existence, one’s feelings and dreams and thoughts and actions, reduced into some lines of print flanked by ads for new cars and yearly sales. Whatever happens to me, I don’t want to become a paragraph, a name in an obituary, a photo hanging over someone’s door. I don’t want to become a character in a story, where someone can read it and then say to themselves “Ah, how complicated a person he must be!”, yet have infinite room for misunderstanding and misrepresentation of the real me, who, I believe, only I can truly know”, he said, and at this point he physically winced, obviously deeply affected by the whole thing. He paused for a while, and briefly concluded, “Sometimes when I walk on the street and pass all these countless people by, I get this…this urge to run up to them, stop them in their tracks and just say ‘Hi, I’m me, I was about to walk by you. Who are you? What are your thoughts? What do you feel when you wake up in the morning? How do you see the world?’. My friend,” and at this point he smiled, “before I go, I wish only that some stranger would stop me and ask me who I was. Not that I’d be able to answer, of course”. I merely sat in mute awe.
Once again I started thinking, this time reflecting on how embarrassed I used to be whenever I talked about things like this with someone else. When such matters were contemplated in quiet solitude, they seemed like the most important things in the world. But when there was someone else to hear them, it made them seem almost…child-like. I often wondered if I was just a child, asking “why” to everything that came alone, dissecting every situation into tiny pieces in my head, and constantly left with this feeling of total powerlessness at the fact that there seemed to be no clear answers. On the rare occasions that such topics did come up in conversations, I always knew mid-way in any of my pseudo-intellectual tirades that I sounded like a fool. What was it? The tone? The subject itself? My own take on it? I’d asked these questions a thousand times before, but still, I had no answer. Temporarily saddened by such thoughts, I looked again at him continuing a swirling and bombastic speech on the nature of morality, and gave him the first genuine smile of the evening.
As it approached midnight, I could tell that tomorrow I would wake up and think this all to be a strange dream. We had now dried up my supply of drinks for a week, and I noticed that my head would beat in an almost soothing rhythm every time I closed my eyes. My mouth tasted funny, and I seemed to be unable to stop obsessively ruffling my hair. He looked like he was taking it a lot better than me, although I was in no state to make such judgements. Just seeing him there, playing with my goldfish (whose memory was better than most, I must say), I once again was thrown back to the past. To a time where I placed no value on his company, and where I actively avoided him. I felt genuinely sad, but didn’t know how to express it.
With these thoughts swirling in my head, I didn’t even notice my eyes shutting, and less still that it was well into the next day when I awoke. Naturally, he had let himself out long before my drowsy awakening. I was forced to feel content, sitting there alone, not a soul in sight, at the start to another new year. I had the feeling that things were different now, but I couldn’t really tell whether that was just the morning playing tricks on me. I wanted to reach for the telephone to wish him a prosperous new year, but I hesitated for a second, and wondered whether things had really changed at all. I sighed, and disposed of the bottle of cheap, cheap wine.
