Displacement Diaries Of The Sleepless

The 3AM peregination

2010-08-18T01:53:00.000-07:00

So I took a walk at 3am. A walk to organize the reverie which goes through one’s 3am mind. All the culminations of the week, the do’s and the don’ts of the affairs of the heart, the index of the beginning of a mundane week, the addendums of the remainder of a slightly stirred weekend, Jane Austen’s persuasion in my bag, and the most disposable, shaky perseverance in my heart, slightly tingling in my fingertips (course of the bloodstream?). Its 3am in a dodgy city but when you walk not knowing where you are headed, you look so foot-strong, it is an illusion, like a mended heart or a bad gin.

It would be so easy to just break some glass in your apartment instead during emotionally unregulated nights like these than to take a walk; but issues of neatness, decorum, and the general non-feasibility of courage keep me (plus something as celluloid as that should have an audience). This behavioral inability impregnates me with a seemingly fantastic idea about a place where people can just go and break glassware, dishes and fancy china, ingeniously called something like “soul-spas” or “anger-salons”. Anyway, so 3am walk on a pristine looking pavement with no pedestrian companions apart from the 3 threatening shadows of your own self, all extracting the life out of a cigarette.

I find my most wobbly yet strangely stabilizing spot in the 3am café. It is my strategically situated spot of silent observations, reflections, and consolations and of course conversations. All screamingly silent. Strangers surrounding me, intertwining our temporary 3am aimlessness with each other. Weakly drunk kids, compulsive as well as punished insomniacs, caffeine comforters.. all of us desperately seeking tacit company. The radio plays a relevant song, well; at least it seems relevant at 3am, all songs do, don’t they? Maybe it is the liquidity of the feelings that just takes the shape of the closest song.

Like a shrine where we congregate in our sleeplessness or like an escapade where we vacate into to feel nothingness. Where we break invisible glass as we read our books, stare into our screens or order our coffees unusually loud. We are all settling in this otherwise unwelcome whimsicality (that usually a painter is a proud owner of). We look busy but we really are all, unanimously, just watching the waitress robotically mop the floor; we really are just mirthfully shattering our strength that was carefully constructed over the week. We are partners in this therapeutic vandalism. At 3am, until we find a reason to retire back into thoughtfulness.

art - Coffee Cartel, water colours on canvas

artiste - Marilynne Bradley

url - here

Quelling questions

2010-08-11T22:04:00.000-07:00

She always knew falling in love with a matador would be as dangerous as his occupation. Love is a losing game for many, or so she had heard. Only that, one has already won when they decide to fight a savage bull; unlike her blurry consortium with the matador, the ending of which was uncertain. She refrained from asking him if he loved her, if he missed her. She reveled in his slight presence when he was around. She spiraled in his heavy longing when he was away (she couldn’t tell where for she never asked). She did not want to inflict him with any more misgivings than he already suffered, about his job and by the virtue of his job, his life. She did not subject him to all those mundane inquiries of her heart and these inquiries (does he watch when I leave the room?) would quietly dissolve in her submitting heart. At night she would rest the remainder of her inquiries (can he name the song of my life?) in his scars and sleep with flickering eyes. The resignation was only temporary just like the vacuous gaze he conferred upon her when she smiled at him.

During days, an unfamiliar frown would appear on her forehead as she tried to reckon the reasons for his choices. Why did he fight bulls? Why did he never hold her face when he kissed her? Why did he never notice her cry when they made love? She would catch herself feeling jealous of the bull whose eyes he did look into. Who’s head he did hold tightly and before who he did present himself with the barest of gumption. She had not seen him glancing sideways at another woman. She hated that unlike other women she could not utilize that consolation. She hated when he told her “whatever you liked” (should I wear the red dress?). She needed him to care for her heart or break it, not just keep it suspended in passive concurrence. She knew that matadors had to keep their composure while the bull’s sanity teeters. She wondered how it would be to instigate the matador’s temper for a change. What if she asked him if he missed her while he fought the bulls? If he wanted to deploy his belligerent vulnerability to her like she was ready to charge towards him. If he wanted to dancingly yield himself to her, like he did to the bull.

Art - Matador Luis Miguel Dominguin, pencil on paper

Artiste – Pablo Picaso

url - here

Smithereens of a self

2010-08-04T20:07:00.000-07:00

The hardest, almost unachievable, task in the world is to keep yourself together; to prevent the sundry fragments of your being from scattering into the wind on a restive evening. Like petals of a dandelion, your atoms attach themselves to your existence and one whiff of change is enough to disperse them. You nurture your loosely adhesive marbles of sanity, grapple to keep them together, in the concave pit of your reasoning, resisting inclinations and embracing inertia. You sever kinship with tears. Stoicism is your consort (but not your comfort). You bury your unraveling seams inside, wear your courage inside out. Your semblance hangs threateningly by one thread of an unsecured belonging. Your carefully under-rug-swept irk shows an ugly hunch. And as you taste your angrily brewed tea on that restive evening, bitterness is what rolls upon your tongue and slides down across your splintering length.

Your perfectly mistimed mistakes spill out of the closet of your skin and it begins to crack, oozing them out. You look at your diffident feet, too scared to take even the easiest step. You envy the carelessness your heart was once, not far long ago, capable of. Your hands tremble as you reach the innards of your composure to prod it a little, for prodding may ease you a little bit. The immediate under surface may settle if left astir. Maybe you should abandon the vain trails of resoluteness. Sometimes you should pain yourself to find numbness. It’s funny how you will learn to grow out of the unchanging. How you will learn that the constancy you feel will be temporary. Resilience is not always the answer to a meltdown, sometimes acquiescence is. It is untrustingly yet dependably okay to let your faith waver in yourself. For sometimes you learn what’s wrong only when u quit trying.

Art title – fragments

Artiste – Jorgen Klausen

Image url - here

Utopian Breakfast

2010-07-24T02:18:00.000-07:00

The moon dissolves, takes the shape of a river across the still sky, the night wraps itself around you like a burkha, restraining your seamless desires, your fears insist on floating on the half empty glass of wine and the cigarette refuses to rescue you. The lamp watches you stealthily from the next room; the couch is your comfort tonight. The music is a reminder of all things that were once close as well as near to you. You watch distant city lights impale through the tree at your window and you want to hurl yourself at the longing that it shines upon you. An irresolute breeze from the east whirls around a lock of your hair, probably soaked in the breath of someone you know. A half read, wholly realized book about wanderlust lies next to you, bookmarked by one of your feelings, alongside the keys to the door that you sometimes wish you never come back to. And alongside a place in your mind from where you wish you never have to come back from.

A place where everything is alright. Like a store that sells securities in exchange of your mean blues and your demonic reds. Holly Golightly’s Tiffany’s, if you will. A place where you can finally buy some furniture without uncertainty. Where you don’t want to throw your dirty clothes on the floor. Where you want to sneak into the bed with your neighbour, not to fuck, just to sleep. A rainbow’s end, obscure, but worth chasing. Where the sea won’t be mundane because although you can see it, you can’t walk to it. And the skies won’t be cheerfully bright everyday.. some days it will be moodily dark (yet rainless). The people will know your face but know you only at arm’s length. The places of worship are those where you can sit for hours busy in inoccupation. The children are playful but not noisy and the cars are seen only at the promenade. People walk with a mission, talk with a matter and eat with a moan. Where the people and the government are like bittersweet lovers. Where the people know that there is such a lot of world out there to see. Where the people know that they can throw their keys away and never come back if they wished to.

image courtesy - smallpanda

Fallen

2010-07-17T12:47:00.000-07:00

Remorse either forms you into entirety or shatters you to the point of no repair. Like when you forget about your pet while you are on a vacation; when you lose an entire week of friendship to a silly quarrel; or when you realize that you had loved someone wrongly after they have moved on. When you lament over details of helplessness, when the deed cannot be undone or the soul cannot be redeemed, leaving you with the ashes of regret. When the past follows your present and your sins befall your repentance. It is not easy to open your fist and let go off that sticky air of disappointment you caused. Like a mother who secretly knows she did not do it well, like a doctor who carries the burden of a mistake or a scientist who stole. The universe twists itself around your rue and submerges you into a vast ocean of soul-ache, untreated by the sorrow you feel, unrelieved by the weight you carry. No words (spoken or unspoken) or touch (favoured or commanded) will be consecrating.

The demon manufactured by your misgiving refuses to face down. You are rendered irreproachable for you only have yourself to blame. When you stand 2 inches from the edge and want to take that leap into resurrection; what keeps you is the fear that something anti-gravitational will pull u back upwards and bring you back to the point of guilt. Like an endless purgatory, the pain will be yours, bespoke for you, to fit your conscience permanently. Try as you may to wash the fabric of your tainted soul but the stain remains, reminding you of what you could have done better. Of how you could have made it right, like a string that remains plucked and never stops trembling. You could have loved better, that you could have tried harder. But when you think your compunction has turned into a plague on the ship of your soul, it will help to remember that failure can be validating. That a misstep can be imparting. And it is comforting to know that there is an entire galaxy that lies between an ‘if’ and a ‘then’, studded with the stars of possibilities, some shining, some dwindling. An effort is the mother of a deed and is thus superior to it.

illustrative art – “Remorse”, 2005, acrylic, oil pencil, raw pigment and cold wax on paper

artiste – Matt Pipes

art url - here

The Quietening

2010-07-09T01:59:00.001-07:00

I heavenly despise the rains. The cliché about the smell of wet soil invoking childhood memories, unleashing the endorphins within a jaded vein, the wet grass blissfully burdened by drops of stationed rain, the sight of an obscure, bedraggled bird fluttering the rain off its greasy feathers, the occasional rain sneaking in through a half open window, the wet drapes that had surreptitiously broken out through the half open window, the soaked fabric on the perfectly contoured skin of a hurrying stranger on the street, a helpless yet oddly merry critter seeking a temporary shelter, a homeless man looking up towards the sky (not really hopeless though), the miraculously dry patch of ground underneath a full grown tree.. I despise all of it.

Oh how utterly blighting it is to have to wade through murky water with your most darling shoes on. You suffer the refusal to comprehend that there are those little and big greens that thrive on it. That there are droughty villages pining for a perfectly dark cloud, without any silver in it. There is a restive child that becomes composed with the prospect of making paper-boats, providing respite to the vexed mother. There is an ocean that wants herself impregnated again. There is a tin roof that wants to make music with the rain drops. There is a girl who wants to hide her tears in the rain while her lover leaves her. There is a world set afire that awaits being doused and there is a wilting flowering plant longing to be quenched. And there is a heart yearning to take the shape of the rain.

Yes, I despise the rains; as I despise myself for the realization of this glorious dependency it suffuses me with.

art - Rain Shape

artiste - Angus McPherson

image url - here

Nearness of departure

2010-06-17T08:55:00.000-07:00

He was a happy man. The kind of happy a man is when he pitches the tent right. He mowed the lawn at just the right time; he did not prioritize an afternoon nap and he had a timetable for emptying the dustbin. He did not quite complain when it rained on a picnic as long as he felt accomplished about the directions; he made his bed everyday right after he woke up and closed all the jars after he cooked, closed them all the way. He was an assured man. The kind of assured a man is whose life isn’t the sum of his anger or his failures.

But tonight a brand new feeling was about to temporarily fracture his orderliness. Especially the orderliness of his interior. A ceremonious dinner among the oligarchs called for a crisp suit he had neatly picked out earlier in the day. The flightiness of his cuff -links kept slightly bothering him but he let it not distract him much.

He had come to find comfort in his wife’s unstructured demeanour. He had acquiesced to the occasional ruffle of her pasty blue dress (a colour he was not particularly fond of). She barely combed her hair, she just threw them together. It mildly perturbed him; he measured his daily salt intake even. She used the word “love” way too oft; sometimes he hated when she ran the water a little too fast for his comfort (splashing droplets on the edges of the basin) and insisted on rolling the windows down while driving on the highway.

He watched her from a certain distance, her hair still wondrously held together by a flimsy clip. The tiny rivulets streaming along her champagne glass (he would have killed them with a coaster). And a closeness she exuded he had never seen before, as she talked to that stranger. Her eyes sparkled with the blissful longing like that of a postcard's. He liked to think she knew the stranger from her past, but his emotional arrangements stopped him from delving into possibilities. There was such careful aberrance to her body language, a musical irregularity in the bounce of her lashes and her fingers gently squashed the rivulets every now and then.

Krall’s Departure Bay played faintly in the back. The song had an entire season contained in it. An entire season of departure, detachment, disentanglement. He righted his cuff-links and quickly hid the doubtful looking water-circle with a coaster.

art - Diana Krall, Jazz Portriats, oil on canvas

artiste - Merryl Jaye

image url - here

The hitchhiker's guide to Faces.

2010-06-04T11:37:00.000-07:00

To walk aimlessly in a city is one of the hardest things to do. There are heady pockets of people everywhere trying to recruit you into their march. You don’t want to come across as a gypsy indulging in a whim of wanderlust. The urban nation tends to outcast anything that is slow and desultory. I have submitted myself into believing that my little saunter must have a purpose too: Watching Faces. It is like launching yourself into the galaxy of faces looking for a hitchhike. A gamut of countenances; some engrossed in their occupation, some into their coffee and some astray. Hitchhiking through each other. Looking for a flitting shelter for that floating moment into each other’s visages.. some hostile, some unbolted.
I believe my countenance can be rather rigid. It is a testimony of all the years lived in the battlefield of an alpha city. Like the lover who learnt living through times of hatred. Like the façade of a quaint little café built to serve the soldiers of the war. Inside it is much too interpretable if not so from the outside. I believe I miss out on many the attempts of breezy pleasantries. I tend to be on a mission and perhaps I lose out on the finery of requests like an absorbed street musician. The carefully construed exterior renders me myopic. Maybe there is a soldier stranded out in the tempest waiting to be let in. I can use a small pit stop in my peregrination too. So next time when there is a cushy little knock on my façade; I am letting the stranger in with a welcoming smile like that brisk cream streaking across the surface of a warm cappuccino.

art title - Holocaust Faces, Jewish Museum, Berlin. artiste - Polaroids image url - here

P.S. when I fall in love, I will stop the frame, play this song and then continue in slow motion.

The compelling

2010-03-26T01:15:00.000-07:00

She sat at the blurry end of the bar; sipping her dry Gin, dry as her ability to love, in tiny, erratically spaced intervals between her perfectly timed drags. She hid her face into the obliterating light away from the cheerful levity around her. She watched beams of fluorescent light merge and diverge, and converge back again. It was timed. Timed like her affairs with comforting strangers. A pattern to everything, planned and postulated, rehearsed and rerun. She takes a gander at her watch, 12.30am. “Here we go” she tells herself, addressing that irresolute part of her, which needed attendance.

She sometimes wished she was wholly consumed in industry, in a hobby or even the daily humdrum. She sometimes liked to bake (averagely tasting pumpkin muffins) and hated herself for constantly tasting the batter as she beat it. She washed dishes to cleanse herself off the crud of a recent unrequited romance and sometimes rested her head on the cabinet in front, closing her eyes in a blank reverie, while holding a dish as the water ran. She wondered if she looked clumsily distracted while she picked up the wrong cereal from the endless cereal aisle at the store (she loathed being clumsy). But somehow the mundane failed to accommodate her waywardness.

Now here, in this dive, a conundrum of perfumes fills the already chaotic air with contemplation. Strangers stare at her and she stares back into their strangeness. The blaring noise helps her drown the concerns she usually battles with staring at the ceiling, lying in her big empty bed, which seems to get bigger and emptier at nights. She watches her legs, imperfect because they stop short of the ground, but she loves them, at least tonight, glistening and full of grace. She requests the night to be kind, in company or in idleness. If not calming, then numbing at the least. If not fulfilling, then terse at the least. Neon throws a smoke ball into a coloured cloud and she watches it float and crash into a big man’s back. Crash and splatter into pieces, never to be put back together. She tries to ignore it; tonight she wants to be put together. Or be attempted at, at the least.

BUT, she is ready to learn of the power of love

art title - Neon

artiste - The Abstract Art Store

url - here

The technicolour coat of passive optimism

2010-03-12T04:41:00.000-08:00

The air these days is impregnated with anticipation and crispness. Hope floats, not just in corporeal hearts, but even those hibernating barks and boughs, heavenly dormant and silently breathing all winter, bundling up sustenance for a vernal celebration. I wake up to the twitter of an obscure songbird and not the hissing of congealed air. The windows clatter with the mirth of being released from locks, doors to the patio begin to get ready for the opening act of the season. The dreary yellow has started to hue a welcoming shade of green. Parks have begun to look more affable (the way squirrels have begun to look less timid).

When you open your palms and close them back, a fistful of air crumbles inside them. When you sigh a deep sigh, the essence of an impending bloom traps inside your nostrils. When you look towards the sky, clarity is strewn between the occasional cloud and the newly gathered sun. Orchestrated happiness befalls you. As much as you detest it, resist it, desist it, it wraps around the casket of your misery and penetrates so virulently, so helplessly, leaving you weak, at the hands of imposed, almost inflicted joy. Seasonal merriment dictates your pessimism. All you can do is lay back and slump inside your quilt of woven feelings and let this season of serendipity replace the scratchy cynicism that you have long been wearing to keep warm from the cold.

art title - Hope

artiste - Heidi Daley

image url - here

Everybody Hurts (Violence of vulnerability)

2010-02-09T05:15:00.000-08:00

Angry words dangerously suspended in mid air. Thrown across by the gullibility of a vulnerable heart. Lurking like demons to irreparably damage the intended. Some fail; miss the target and others craftily find a fragile part through our guards. The car is resplendent with heat and turbulent with emotions. We go round for a round. Empty the empty blames on each other. We scream through the dark, ready to charge towards our respective insecurities. We take our timidities by the neck while our capabilities watch shamelessly. We wring the weakness of our liaison and we shatter the vessels of our morale. We drain the energies out of our expectations. More angry words, more painful accusations. Our hands thrown up and fingers pointing threateningly. Peremptory knocks on fellable doors.

4am of a cold, inflammable night. There are families somewhere in the neighborhood who have fallen asleep inside their composite lives. There are trees that are figuring a way to come back in the spring and wind that is making a momentary stop outside this car. But we are too consumed in our disorganized little version of dysfunction. Maybe we should roll down the window and let a little trust inside. Maybe we should stop saying another word and reflect a little on that sad Cypress standing starkly in the cold. Maybe our defenses will cost us this night. Our doubts will expend a million moments. Maybe we should touch each other. Or just look into our eyes a little longer, with our mouths shut and endearments open. Maybe we should look at ourselves in the mirror, like that, waging this war, inside this car. Maybe the pregnant silence that will follow will reconcile the fragments of this night. And join this night back again, dot by dot.
Maybe we will find a way to unlock our vulnerabilities inside this locked car. May it be.

art title - demolition/vulnerability
artiste - Amy Jackson
url - here