EVERYTHING IS DIFFERENT FROM THE SHORE
Sometimes the memory of a painful experience comes to us in snatches, little by little, imperceptibly, like the day fading to darkness. I think it is the truest secret of pain. Pain is what remains after the bitter memory fades.
I remember how we watched a kite cruising through the sky. How it folded its wings and swooped down expertly, scavenging the remains of a dead chicken. I told her she was like the kite, scavenging what was left of my heart. It is funny how a loving relationship can sometimes be poetry in motion. And what did she say?
"You make the little things important."
She was a swarthy girl with a dark hair like wool, and a smile that conveyed the undulation of her angular, perfect face. Perhaps nature is kinder to a few persons, and I thought Diamond was the kind of girl that exuded the incredible bias of nature. How her smile was a rendition in itself, only sonorous in the sound of silence.
I told her I was a firefly and she was my illumination. She mostly smiled through my mostly weird and spontaneous utterances. That encrypted smile that plops down between disbelief and ridicule. She said I was too intelligent and intelligent people were the most dangerous. They were good with words, they could narrow the mighty ocean into droplets of water from the edge of a roof. She held forth about how an intelligent writer could dissect every fragment of his lives into perceptible fictions. How an ensuing relationship could be the muse to a story he had up his sleeves.
"Are you going to write about me?" She asked.
Perhaps I inadvertently emboldened her stance when I told her I had already written about her in the innermost section of my mind. How the doors that flanked the aisle of my mind had her face etched on them. It was the first time I had fallen in love. It was a feeling that started from a simple conversation.
"How does a writer whose death is being written by another writer rewrite the story of his death?"
Diamond was studying philosophy, and was an ardent proponent of determinism. She fed off the belief that a man could only float around the sea of his life. He could swim within its depth, but he could not leave the sea because someone had put him there. An ethereal writer who was writing his story.
I had refused to subscribe to the foundation of her question. When you immerse yourself in the story of the life and death of a man, the man should be the one holding the pen. Perhaps one could tell his story, but life is mostly a gift, and if the man decide to reject this gift at any point, no writer could un-write it. She had smiled her uncanny smile. She had shaken my hand and told me how she had the vivid perception that I was the kind of guy that subscribed to the theory of freedom.
"No one is really free," she said, smiling.
We would go out on a few dates. We would scale through an infinity of discourses, and slowly, I would find my heart slowly being entwined with hers. There were times we completed each other’s sentences. Times when our eyes met and told the same story.
Only, pain is one of the biggest weapon in the armory of a memory. I remember how the opaqueness of the blameless blue sky made the gibbous moon lonely. How Diamond’s smile lacked its usual vitality. How the defiant atmosphere presaged a downpour. How it got colder and colder, and how it seemed nature conspired with the trajectory of her rumination.
"I know what you want. But for how long? How long before you think I am too tiny or too intelligent?" She swooped her face down. She was almost moved to tears.
I told her I would love her forever. Once again, I found myself immersed in the depth of poetry. I told her how we might scale different worldviews, and perhaps be distant in a few segments of our thoughts, but love sometimes unified differences. How it was like looking at the union of the sea and the sky on the horizon. So distant, and yet so close.
"We are too young to understand forever. I once fell for this, and I am only just recovering. I don’t want to make the same mistake again."
She ran away from my line of vision. The rain started to trickle down, draining me of the reverie I had been encapsulated in.
The thing about pain—the residue of a bitter memory—is that it actuates the notion that the script could be augmented. It ridicules the reality of a final end. And perhaps it is true. Perhaps there is truly no end. There is only the willingness to give up or the unwillingness to let go. And perhaps it does reify the uncertainty that engulfs the notion of whether the world is determined or free. No one can truly tell. Not when the story is still on the writer’s table, and the writer has no idea what to write.
