“Don’t talk about loneliness. Because he could be lonely, yes. I don’t want to cry at a party.”
You have a gender for your lighter. And you told me you want to cry before we even exchanged names. I only wanted to borrow the lighter, and cracked the bad joke about loneliness of a lighter lost in a pocket to fill the silence while you looked for it tapping multiple pockets on your shirt and pants with both your hands.
“But you have to the tell the stories. Even if it makes people cry” I wanted to say but I left, without waiting for the lighter.
There’s a feeling one can get when making contact with good poetry or a very good sad song for the first time: you can’t just listen to it all at once the first time you hear it because it says too much and you don’t have it in you to feel that much all together. That’s what you sounded like.
I hardly ever saw you again but I often thought of you while peeling garlic, or cleaning my table, or when feeding my dog, for the coming weeks.
A week ago a tree in my garden fell after a long night of passing storm. I think If I were to use the idea of tree as a metaphor for you, it could fit.
Because isn’t a poet like a lonely tree on a highway? Having to sway in dancing winds, while so many people pass by, watch it withering, but nobody stops to water it.
But on second thought, you couldn’t be a lonely tree. Because all the songs you played that night at the gig were about happiness. You drank through a bottle of water (or gin) with each song passing maybe to gather the strength to sing and lie about wanting to be stranded on an island and making a happy home of one , and forgetting about your sorrows when sitting on a rock in the middle of a flowing river, rolling joints, as winds knock all your hash over.
So maybe you’re just an artist. Covering a sad life with happy songs, so you can move around crowds of laughing people and feel like you fit. Maybe that’s what art is. A way to make your difference feel less alone. Giving you the confidence to stand in front of an audience and blend in, feeling safe because you know you can’t relate to anybody.
But I don’t have much credit to myself for having these ideas about you. I am generally the one who goes to a friend’s gig, and not the other way round. On top of that I haven’t written a song in months now, and I go around playing old songs at new parties.
And I was doing exactly that at the party yesterday when I saw you again in the crowd, looking under the carpet. It made me very angry because I was playing my saddest song, and it moved the whole room but you didn’t care. If the joke about a lighter feeling lonely while it’s lost in your pocket could make you want to cry, why would you be here still?
Because here I was, slicing a fresh wound from my life and marinating it with words and songs, frizzbing it out in the open hoping someone would make a run for it and catch it but you were muttering something to yourself and “were distracted by an ant trying to crawl over the carpet”, as you told me later in the smoking room when I asked you if you were okay because you ‘seemed’ distracted. Bonus move. Now the fault was yours, and not mine.
It was not a power play. I would never have asked, but I am running out of things to think and write about and needed another sentence from you before I left.
I walked home that night because I couldn’t sit still in a cab. Thousands of words flashing through the mind trying to help me say what I was feeling.
Words- termites that don’t know nothing else but to eat. They want a bite of everything around the room that is your mind. Every little furniture, curtains. Like desperate little insects, they huddle around each thought and bite a big chunk and spoil everything.
But Ants.. under the carpet, are not trying to destroy the carpet.They just hover around round and round, not sure where to go but knowing that they need to be going somewhere.
“Hovering round and round not sure where to go.
Hovering round and round not sure where to go.”
I have to say it over and over again. Like an itching urge to feel a thought physically. Feel it in the air at the back of my throat, watch it vibrate with life before a word is formed and is made alive in this world.
It spoils everything. The words eat it all.
Maybe I should have never spoken to you again, and kept the easier metaphor of loneliness to make sense of this world. Because Loneliness I can feel, but I don’t know what it’s like to be an ant hovering under a carpet. And now you make everything seem meaningless.
Maybe if I told you this, you could have said : Language is inefficient to describe what it feels like to be an ant, yes. But it is the only tool for carrying what feels unbearable. And if sorrow is left unsaid, it disappears under the silence that loads it and that experience dies a double death.
Or maybe something else.
And maybe if I told this to language, if it were a person, it would say: “You bring me your ant related chaos and I’ll bring you your order. I can’t change sadness, but I can hold it.”
And then everything would be easier. I could just take my inability to write about an ant to this person who’s language and everything would have been okay.
But I am not an ant, you’re not a lonely tree on a highway, and language is not a person. So there’s little solace in thought. The more I think, the more word-termites roam in my mind and eat everything.
But that said, silence is not an option. That would erase us and all we’ve ever lived will disappear like car smoke and we’ll have to pretend it has gone to the clouds and will come back to us with the rains, while it hovers around close to the ground sticking to our lungs making it harder to breathe.
Hover, around...
Like ants that don’t know where to be…
Like an ant under a carpet that never finds a way to reach over the top, and that would be a tragic death because the door to the garden is right over there, at the other end of the carpet.
And so maybe that’s it. That’s why we have to write. Against all odds. With just a memory of how much more worse it could be if we didn’t.
Read part II: Ants that hover under carpets here:
https://medium.com/@avantika.mishra/ants-that-hover-under-carpets-pt-2-801cc633341f
