FREEDOM THROUGH BONDAGE ( = MORE BONDAGE) PART 1.

PHASE 1

I first saw Pedushka in my Kathmandu hostel where I duly noted cobalt eyes, a laugh that ran like a mountain stream and an emerald green Punjabi pantsuit barely coating a petite but pleasingly cherubic form, full as a jug of milk. We fell naturally into conversation about her recent adventures drinking yak’s blood at some Nepalese cultural festival in the Himalayas, how much she enjoyed the taste of it, the migration of shamanic traditions originating from ancient Siberia, paganism, meditation and some other things I couldn’t remember because I was slowly falling for her in a way that prevented me from comprehending the content of what she was saying, too busy transfixed by a face that bore an intense beauty that cut deep like razorblades across my eyes. By the end of our conversation I couldn’t even listen to the words she was saying because all I could hear in my head was a million tiny voices whispering: Jesuschristmothermaryyouaresolovelyyouaresogoddamnlovelysogoddamnlovelysogoddamngoddamngofuckingdamnlovelylovelylovelylovelylovelyfuckinglovelylovelyfuckingfuckfuckchristfuckinglovelylovelylovelyfuckingfuckfuckfuckfucklovelyfucklovelylovelyfuckfuckcuntcuntfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck… As per usual, once I realized I was attracted to her, I did the most logical thing a man in the presence of a newly found love object would do: I made my excuses and fled into the night like a coward, leaving her sitting there at the table, slightly confused at my sudden departure. If I was to attempt to describe my attitudes to women, I would not say they are one of love or hatred, they are one of fear. Women scare the shit out of me. Especially the ones I’m attracted to. It’s a rare torture to be afraid of what you want the most, enough to drive a man batshit insane, the surveillance nanobots lodged in my occipital lobe often reminded me late at night. As Pedushka disappeared from view, I recognized a familiar cycle of emotions beginning in me:
Stage 1. Trapped, unfulfilled, wanton desire.
Turning into:
Stage 2. Frustration.
Turning into:
Stage 3. Anger.
Turning into:
Stage 4. Deep regret.
Turning into:
Stage 5. Forced Indifference.
Turning into:
Stage 6: Defensive Apathy.
Turning into:
Stage 7. Forlorn acceptance.
Turning into:
Stage 8. Defiant Apathy.
Turning into:
Stage 9. More trapped unfulfilled, wanton desire, frustration, anger, deep regret, forced indifference, self-pity, defensive apathy, forlorn acceptance and defiant apathy. Repeat ad infinitum.
Turning into:
Stage 10. Exhaustion.
Turning into:
Stage 11. Urge to masturbate.
Finally resulting in either:
Stage 12a. Writing.
Stage 12b. Readings about spirituality.
Stage 12c. Meditation.
Stage 12d. Masturbation.
Stage 12e. All of the above in that exact order.
For the next week while I stayed at the hostel, I did the most romantic thing i could do: I avoided her like the plague. In the end I had to leave the hostel for my next port of call and I assumed that was that. I would never see Pedushka again and there was nothing between us in the first place, just another obsessive infatuation created by a love-starved mind, with no anchoring in reality. I remember her sitting at the table in the common room the night before I left. I decided to at least say goodbye. I went up to her and stood next to her table. She was writing in her journal. She kept a journal. Ugh. So hot. ‘Uhh… Bye.’ I said to my fantasy who had descended into the material plane. She looked up at me, flashing a smile like a hatchet driving deep into my chest.
‘You’re going?’
‘Uh uh.’ I grunted.
Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ began to play in the background of my mind. I gritted my teeth, swallowed the lump, turned around and walked towards the darkness at the end of the tunnel.

PHASE 2

A month later I was somewhere else, at another hostel in Nepal, sitting in the common room, trying to sort out this being human mistake when Pedushka came walking in through the door encircled by a flock of white doves exploding into light.
‘Ddiiiiiiiick! How niiice it is to seeee yoouu!’ She said, putting her bags down. She had a vocal habit of elongating her vowels that drove me crazy.
‘Uh uh…’ I grunted, heart thumping. Words like ‘fate’ and ‘kismet’ and ‘destiny’ flashed across my mind, impounded in quotation marks so my defensively cynical mind would accept them.
‘How are you?’ She asked. I stared at her. All the fantasies that I was unable to suppress about her over the past month came flooding to the foreground.
‘I… I… I think we need to make a suicide pact together. It’s the only logical option.’ I didn’t have the balls to say. Instead, once again, I made my excuses and fled into the night, angry voices emanating from my heart and dick, shouting at my head.
You fucking asshole what are you doing? Screamed my heart.
Why are you always running away from what you want you fucking pussy? Screamed my dick.
Did your dick just call you a pussy? Are you going to take that? Screamed my pussy.
‘SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP HEART DICK PUSSY!!!’ I yelled, punching myself in both my heart, dick and pussy. I doubled over in pain on the dormitory floor, set my phone alarm for 23 minutes and lay there in foetal position, breathing heavily and moaning softly for the allotted amount of time. Pedushka was there for the next week and each day I simultaneously looked forward to and dreaded seeing her. But everytime I saw her, no words could come forth from my mouth, my lips too bound by the many self cock-blocking psychic booby traps that had been laid out in my formative years. On her final night at the hostel, I was drunk and thinking it was my dormitory’s room, accidentally wandered into her’s, where she was organizing and packing her things.
‘Heelloo…’ She said to me demurely.
‘You’re going?’ I said, suddenly struck by the fact that she would be leaving me once more.
‘Yess… I’m hitchhiking to India tomorrow.’
‘Oh no.’
‘Why’s that?’ She asked, smiling. Pedushka had the kind of secret smile that made you feel like she knew something that you didn’t, or perhaps something you didn’t know you knew.
‘It’s just that uhh… You want to go outside on the patio and chat for a while? I got some Rakshi.’ I said, showing her the wrinkled plastic bottle of moonshine that hung heavily on my breath.
‘Sure… Why not?’ We headed outside and talked for several hours about pantheism, meditation, Bakhtin’s theory of carnival, Black mass, the denial of nature in Christianity, why slow tempo metal offered a form of emotional release no other genres of music could and other things I couldn’t remember because I was slowly falling for her in a way that prevented me from comprehending the content of what she was saying, too busy transfixed by a being that bore an intense radiance that burned like a flaming blade of glacial ice plunged deep into my guts.
‘I wish we had talked earlier.’ I said glum with regret.
‘It’s better to of talked now than not at all.’ She replied. As we chatted into the wee hours, I was beset by 38 seperate voices coming from everywhere inside of me encouraging me to kiss her.
But how? I asked them, while trying to maintain concentration on what she was saying.
Just do it. Commanded the nanobots. I had never worked out how to do this well, how to transition from talking to a girl to just mashing your lips into theirs with little or no follow up. What were the steps that led up from crossing the threshold from words to physical actions that prevented any further words from being spoken? I didn’t fucking know. As my desire wrestled with my fear, my head tried to calculate the distance between my lips and hers trying to formulate the best path of least resistance in crossing the no man’s land that lay between. But the more calculations it made, the more errors arose, unable to concentrate fully on the mathematics of the situation, instead examining the pleasing contours of her mouth and shape of her eyes and drawing triangles linking all three points together. The night wore on as her face filled up with geometric shapes shutting me out and slowly I grew tired and conversation trickled to a stop. There was a silence. This was it. I had to say something.
‘Uhh… Do you want to go up to the roof?’ I asked.
‘The roof? But it’s raining.’ She said.
‘It’s not raining that much.’ I answered. But it was. It was the fucking monsoon. I looked outside the patio where we had been sitting and buckets of rain fell every second drowning the whole land around us in water.
A pair of frogs hopped by the open door next to us, probably off to fuck in a flooded rice paddy somewhere nearby.
I wish I was a frog. I thought.
‘Maybe you’re right.’
‘Can you help me pack my tent please?’ She asked.
‘Of course.’ We went to her dorm room and I helped her pack her tent.
‘Well I guess this is it.’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’ll be gone in the morning to India.’
‘Yes…. Oh look at that!’ She said pointing to a little firefly in the corner of her room. We went towards it and sat watching its abdomen flicker with fluorescent green for a few moments. Awkwardly, I tried to kiss her on the cheek. It was too dark to see the expression on her face, but the execution contained too many contradictory impulses and I was given the classic cheek-turn-deflect that most men and substantially less women had encountered many times in their romantic careers, yet still hurt a little each time.
Phew. Maybe she isn’t into me. At least I know now. I sighed with relief. Sometimes finding out that a girl wasn’t into me was as liberating as finding out that they were. At least I could now get on with my life without being bogged down by all the what-ifs.
‘Are you on facebook?’ She asked. I nodded. We exchanged details on two pieces of paper. I folded mine and hid in my shirt pocket like a piece of stolen bread.
‘Goodbye. Safe travels you beautiful thing.’ I mumbled.
‘What? You keep mumbling, my Engleesh is not my first language.’ She said. ‘Oh I was just saying goodbye. That’s all. Goodbye. Safe travels.’
I gave her a hug and we parted ways.

PHASE 3

Two days passed, spent in a cage of intense longing and heavy drinking. The internet was always down at the hostel, but late one night while drunk, I managed to log on. Pedushka had sent me a friend request me on facebook and had sent a message. She said she had enjoyed talking to me that night and said that it would be nice to meet up at some point somewhere in India. Endorphins flooded my pickled neurons. Finally, someone I liked, liked me. Messages were traded over the next few weeks, exchanging views, ideas and links to bands we liked. Each one of my messages, although rarely exceeding a few hundred words, were painstakingly drafted and re-drafted, hours spent on each word, days on each sentence, poring over minute tonal fluctuations only I could probably detect, attempting to come across as nonchalantly improvised yet somehow meaningful. I would never reply straight away, knowing to wait a few days in between each response so as not to betray the intensity of feelings that I had for her.
‘You need to say something to her now. Force your hand. You can’t keep sending her links to bands you like forever… Shit gets boring.’ Advised nanobot A300459233f.
‘You’re right… You’re so right, you government spy.’ The resulting message took me several days to compose. Day and night I worked on my sonnet. After hours spent hunched in front of the computer, writing, rewriting and re-rewriting, I finally looked at what I had written.
‘I don’t mean to project idealized fantasies onto you, but I think you are freaking luminous. Hope to hold you close one day. x’
I held my breath and clicked the send button, trying to think positive thoughts, using all my willpower to push all doubts out of my mind. I exhaled loudly. It was done. I spent the next week anxiously awaiting her reply. I spent the following week mired in grief and embarrassment. I kept thinking about what I had written and cringing in shame. Man, what kind of weakass shit was that to write? No wonder she hadn’t replied. It was such a dumb thing to write. What did that even mean? Luminous? What was she, a fucking lightbulb? She’d obviously been scared off and that was that. So what. Another black mark against my name. Another lonely night spent fisting my sillouhette.
I attempted to move on with my life and carried on with my travels. I spent about a week in Kalimpong writing, hanging out with various cousins, uncles and aunties, walking up and down the streets my parents and grandparents had grown up and trying to feel various things that I wasn’t sure were real or not. And then out of the blue I received a message from Pedushka. It said that she had just come out of a ten day Vippassana course and that before then, where she had been travelling in Kashmir there had been no internet and no way of contacting me. Of course she would love to meet with me somewhere and that I needed to let her know as soon as possible as she only had ten days left in India and needed to book a flight soon. My bones rang with joy. I wrote and rewrote a response for several hours, eventually arriving at a suitable reply that was affirmative but did not convey the psychotic amount of euphoria flooding my being:
‘Sure, whatever. It would be cool to like see you and shit…’