One Shot

Realization

It slowly began to dawn on me that I had been staring at her for an impossible amount of time. Lost in my thoughts, lost in the sight of her. But her face didn’t look offended or amused. It almost looked as if she were studying the lines of my face, almost as if she were waiting.

I wanted to take her hand. I wanted to brush her cheek with my fingertips. I wanted to tell her that she was the first beautiful thing that I had seen in two years. The sight of her yawning to the back of her hand was enough to drive the breath from me. How I sometimes lost the sense of her words in the sweet fluting of her voice. I wanted to say that if she were with me then somehow nothing could ever be wrong for me again.

In that breathless second I almost asked her. I felt the question boiling up from my chest. I remember drawing a breath then hesitating-what could I say? Come away with me? Stay with me? Come to the University? No. Sudden certainty tightened in my chest like a cold fist. What could I ask her? What could I offer? Nothing. Anything I said would sound foolish, a child’s fantasy.

I closed my mouth and looked across the water. Inches away, she did the same. I could feel the heat of her. She smelled like road dust, and honey, and the smell the air holds seconds before a heavy summer rain.

Neither of us spoke. I closed my eyes. The closeness of her was the sweetest, sharpest thing I had ever known.

Cities

I love cities with plenty of lights at night. I love a city where you can find a place to do nothing but stare at those lights when the night falls. Like what I am doing right now, in front of the balcony window, staring at the lights far far away, across the sea.

That’s what I love about Mumbai. That’s what I love about Delhi. Every time that I took a plane alone and land in Mumbai at night, every time that I walked on to that bridge in Delhi at night by myself, I am not afraid, I don’t feel lonely, for I could see thousands and thousands of sources of light all around me.

I don’t feel lonely because a light is a trace of human. When a bulb lights up, you know for a reason or another that someone was behind that small sparkle. You know that someone put it there, someone switched it on, someone was there. And that’s reassuring me because you know that you are not alone. It’s a very beautiful code that we have established as human beings.

Just a simple message, I am here, you are not alone.

And that is what you make me feel. That’s how I feel when I am with you.

I read a story when I was a little boy. A boy asked his father what kind of woman he wanted to marry, his father gave her a small piece of paper with a list on it. Funny story, that list happens to be a brief description of the young boy’s mother.

I didn’t pay much attention to the story as I am not the romance story type of guy. But as time went by, I started a list as well, a complicated list by the way because some of my criteria just can’t be summarized up with one simple word, things like ‘If I write a letter to her, she should be able to reply with a similar style of writing’ and ‘good at languages so that I can use plenty of references in plenty of languages’.

I have a theory about growing up. For me that is simply the process of finding a preference for everything. How do you like your tea on a Sunday afternoon, how do you arrange your desk, how do you feel about the feminism, what do you think of religion, and of course, what kind of person do you want to grow old with.

So I made up a list, I didn’t write it down, but it’s been in my head for a very long time. And it’s not like I have been looking for a girl according to the list either. I do compare the girls with my list though, I just didn’t think that what happened to that lucky man would happen to me.

Until I met you.

It’s been a while now, and I am still madly in love with you. I just feel that it’s so easy. It’s easy because you are everything I wanted, I don’t have to waste my time arguing with you about what you should have done. You just do, you just are, the exact same way I wanted it to be done, the exact same way! wanted my girlfriend to be. It is just so easy.

It’s so easy that I began to ask how low are the odds to have someone that could fit my list, my weird list with those indescribable criteria. And then I carry on to think how lower the odds are to actually bump into you. So I looked back on my important life decisions that lead me towards you. I was so close to miss you, several times.

People ask me if I believe in God, I used to say no. But I want to change my answer now.

5 Hours

I light a cigarette and idly sip the water from my glass. When I am bored or nervous I tend to plow right through whatever beverage I might have on hand at the time. It is one of the reasons I can’t drink anymore. Doing this with water just cleans out my system and makes me have to piss a lot. Doing it with whiskey generally ends with my ass falling asleep in the back of a police cruiser, or an ambulance, or the neighbor’s lawn.

I am bored because my friends are inside doing shots. I am nervous because one of these girls across the fire has the most beautiful eyes I can remember seeing in ever. Probably not ever, but the way they reflect the light of the fire, seeming to absorb it and intensify it all at the same time, hypnotizes me. I have a weakness for girls with pretty eyes, and these ones are far more than merely pretty. There is a bold shyness in the way I catch her taking little peeks at me. She never looks directly at me, but rather watches me out of the corner of her eye. The only thing I can’t be sure of is whether it is because she thinks I’m cute or a potential rapist.

I have a mean face, or so I am told. I am often told I look angry when the only thing that would be making me angry is the fact that I am constantly being told that I am, in fact, angry. Which in itself is a vicious cycle to fall into. I’m not sure what is happening now, exactly, but I desperately hope that isn’t it. I’m too old and too jaded to think anything real will come from any girl I might meet in a bar but there is still a small rebel force of my soul that hasn’t given up on the idea yet.

I am shockingly, painfully, desperately lonely. This is not a sentiment or an emotion I will ever share openly with anyone if I can help it. Lonely is a dirty word. Instead of letting the world know that you are human and long for genuine human connection, at least here, in this state, in this bar, whatever the case may be, it communicates that you are a pathetic creature not worthy of having friends. This is illogical. I have a trio of friends just inside those doors, about twenty feet past the stage and across the dance floor. There are at least a dozen people working in there right now that I would call my friend. Yet, if I were to admit I were lonely to any of them, it would only make me look weak.

I am lonely.

But I don’t say that. I don’t say anything. I quietly smoke my cigarette. My water is, for the moment, forgotten at my side. I glance at this beautiful creature, watching the shadows dance on the soft, haunting curves of her cheeks. I ponder what it would feel like to run my fingers through the gentle natural curls in her hair; what her wet lips would taste like against mine; her fingernails pressing into the back of my neck…

That is a dangerous train of thought to board. I disembark promptly, but still smile with my eyes when she looks my way.

There is an innocence and an honesty to this private flirtation that I have not felt in years that rests heavy on me like decades. There is a certain point where the typical ritual mating dance of man becomes intolerably boring. The first time, the first ten times, it is among the greatest and most exhilarating rushes you can ever feel. It rivals the sudden and inescapable thrill of jumping out of plane, of doing glorious battle with a ten foot wall of vengeful flame, of seeing the needle on your motorcycle tick over 140 where pebbles feel like boulders and you experience the physical manifestation of relativity as existence distorts around you.

This is the feeling of butterflies with razor blade wings fluttering around in your belly. This is life distilled to its very pure essence. It’s what you feel as a kid on Christmas morning, assuming your childhood didn’t suck. If it did, maybe it’s what you felt the first time you could afford to buy yourself something awesome, or the day your shitbag abusive parents finally got locked up for being negligent ass holes. Whatever it is that gets your rocks off personally. Some people have probably never felt it, but to you, I’m sorry. How can you describe sight to the blind? Music to the deaf? I am mighty but I cannot reach my atheist hand into the sky and drag God, kicking and screaming, out of divinity to show him to you.

Yet there is a point when you have done it too many times where that blind fire quits raging through your veins. Fifteen? Twenty? Thirty? I’m not sure. Eventually it becomes a meaningless pornographic parade in which the plot and the dialogue are every bit as ridiculous, monotonous, and boring as what you’d find in your average video. Welcome to the digital age, where you can stream every emotionless second of being a sexual supernova frame by frame in HD. Soon you’ll probably be able to download the exact chemical recipe to feel it, shot for shot, physically and emotionally. What a time to be alive.

The hubris of middle age is waning and exhausting.

There are only so many times you can grope in the dark to find some vague and unimportant shared interest: Oh, you also like this band that millions of people know and listen to regularly? Fascinating! You’ve got dogs? Well that’s just… Aren’t animals really great? No, no, I don’t want to see pictures of them. I’m just so caught up looking at your (hideous fucking) eyes, I don’t want to miss a thing (please fucking kill me) about this moment.

There is a pace to the entire affair. You can generally tell whether you’re going to get laid within the first ten minutes. The predictability is infuriating.

Yet here I am, waking demons better kept with chains cinched about their corpses in the dark recesses, flooded within the pools of alcohol that have yet to be washed from the furthest reaches of my inner caves. It’s not so much a conscious choice. It’s just happening. She looks bored, to be honest with you. As if she finds her friends as uninteresting as I do. Like she could speak and be worth listening to if only she was around someone who it wouldn’t be wasted on. Come waste my time, I’m thinking. Let’s pretend for a cigarette, for an hour, for a lifetime that we haven’t both done this too many times before. Let’s act like teenagers. Let’s not know better. Let’s watch this porn from the beginning, for the plot. Be my rich whore and I’ll be your pool boy, baby.

Let’s talk about your dogs.

This glass of water I’m drinking is the least satisfying thing I’ve ever consumed in my life but I am guzzling it like a hiker that has been lost alone in the desert for a week. Okay, maybe not quite that greedily, but I’m burning through it either way. I get up to go inside and take a leak but while I walk by this woman we lock eyes for a half second and get stuck there. I could sit here and describe her half smile, the little mole above her lips, the way the fire shadows cast up from below gave her the faintest sense of being a demon that essentially made certain that I was as helpless in this moment as if she had been a literal succubus. I could tell you about the one stray bang that hung out of place. I could tell you about any of those things in great detail, but instead I’m going to tell you about how I keep walking and never get into the best phase of my life.

Immortal

I know that we all think we’re immortal, we’re supposed to feel that way, we’re graduating. The future is and should be bright, but, like our brief four years in high school, what makes life valuable is that it doesn’t last forever, what makes it precious is that it ends.

I know that now more than ever. And I say it today of all days to remind us that time is luck. So don’t waste it living someone else’s life, make yours count for something.

Fight for what matters to you, no matter what. Because even if you fall short, what better way is there to live?

It’s easy to feel hopeful on a beautiful day like today, but there will be dark days ahead of us too, and there’ll be days where you feel all alone, and that’s when hope is needed most.

Keep it alive. No matter how buried it gets, or lost you feel, you must promise me, that you will hold on to hope and keep it alive.

We have to be greater than what we suffer. My wish for you, is to become hope. People need that.

I know it feels like we’re saying goodbye, but we will carry a piece of each other into everything that we do next, to remind us of who we are, and of who we’re meant to be.

I’ve had a great four years with you, and I’ll miss you all very much.