Mindscape

Another sketch of a story that will be featured in Strangers. Thank you forr all the comments on my last post, they’ve been very helpful!
 
 

I suppose that I let a secret bit of myself slip out when I told him what my definition of everlasting happiness is — the constant thrill of the new start. And it’s funny, because I realise what I’m doing. I’m contouring a whole new self in front of him, the self we both seem to like best. I know that, because I can see him falling for the girl he thinks I am. The most selfish of me wants to go along those lines he traces and fill me up with his favourite colour, to make sure he falls for good.
If only he knew that I don’t take new starts with my coffee in the morning, but I make them later in the afternoon, in between my stories.
If only he knew that I write so I can feel, because if I allowed myself to feel this way out of my writings, it would be setting myself on fire and watching my years burn.
Suddenly, he comes at my end of the table and shows me to get up. Then he puts his hands of my shoulders and locks eyes with me. I know that gaze. I have seen it before. It’s hungry and unreliable. It’s the gaze of a man whose vibrations and chances would go up or down a level, depending on mine. It’s the look in the eyes of a man I could read off a grocery list before spitting out a ‘Yeah, I love you too’ to him one day. He is the man who would end up telling me that he wishes I’d speak to him as well as I write, that he wants to date the other version of me, that I’m less than I advertise. The man who would end up coordinating my movements, my heartbeats, my weather report, who would crawl into my veins and replace my lava with his perfume, who would pull my eyelids up at night and refuse to let me go back to sleep. It’s the gaze of a man I could both love and hate and I’d be unable to find a shade of difference between one and the other. A man who would drive me insane, not metaphorically, but in real bloody life, who would alter me so badly that he would end up being the one to scribble my last artistically viable words and seal the letter.
There is a saying about the calm before the storm. I always thought of myself as the calm before the calm storm, or the calm before the drizzle. Or the calm before two white, fluffy clouds appear on the sky and turn pink with the sunset. But I underestimated the storm forming in my blood cells, because I was the calm before the apocalypse. And when it came, it asked no one. It hit me hard, like I deserved it. It showed me what writing can do for me, that no man on the face of Earth could.
Writing made me tick like nothing ever did. When I began writing, my demons stopped speaking over me. Writing took my hand and walked me to those monsters and made them come alive and walk to my beat. As soon as I decided what that beat would be, the monsters stopped torturing me and turned into strong characters and wilder chapters instead. I got to raise the hell within me and wear it proudly on a sleeve. My hell; my rich and alive imagination, like a rainforest with carnivore flowers and mellow, hypnotic music in the background that I used to dread like the longest, darkest hours of the nights when I couldn’t get any sleep. My imagination, I decided, I was going to use it until it bled and shouted that it needed rest, and then I was going to use it some more. Because, despite all, watching my imagination unfolding is like watching God at work – the best part of me, giving its best. Heavenly.
That’s when I decided I like the storm, the speed, the chaos more, and I was afraid to let men come close in case they ever wanted to replace my magic.
I look at him and think of how I’ll take this 2 a.m. and turn it into vivid dreams tomorrow.
But for now, snap and I’m back to myself, whoever that might be — and that’s the beauty of it.
After all, it’s not flesh and bones I want from life, but words. Words, to still my monsters and make me be the best that I can be, non stop. The ability to ask people to listen to this page I’m writing in my head as we speak, as we move, as we live.

She’s lying on the carpet with a cigarette in her hand, twisting her hair on her fingers. She tells me that nature creates man and then it abandons him. That people’s free will is like every other muscle in the body — left unused, it atrophies in time. That sometimes, the full is empty, and other times, the empty is full. A wool blanket covers her lap from the cold. The balcony’s door has been left wide open. I’m taking notes on the large sofa next to it. The night air is stronger now, my back feels cold. She doesn’t seem to mind. In the middle of her sentence, I can’t help it and interrupt her.
‘Do you believe in what you’re saying?’ I ask.
She bursts into a very feminine laughter. ‘Yeah right now, but not that often…’
She hands me her cigarette and I pull out a smoke, then ask about her writing. She tells me that they are like two almost lovers who first met in a bar many years ago, discovered they have a few friends in common and decided to see each other again; but she’s the one who can’t live without writing, and clings to it all the time. Writing is happy to just sip from a cup of tea at the table, in perfect stillness.
‘This is the path I’ve chosen,’ she tells me. ‘And I know it was the right one.’
‘How do you know?’
‘It’s easy to find it, really. You just look for the one that looks clear. All the other paths have road signs all over.’
‘Road signs?’ I laugh.
‘Yes, road signs, don’t laugh.’
‘And what do these road signs say?’
‘Just the usual: ‘right – wrong’, ‘failure – success’, ‘happiness – fear’. It’s confusing, you’re being told to slow down and speed up all the time. The fun beings when you get to crossroads and never know what to choose. Your heart is giving you the silent treatment, because so did you. Eventually, you turn to your partners for advice and have debates over things that mean nothing to you, and wonder at how boring life got as you aged,’ she laughs. ‘Your path is clear, and it’s all yours. That’s how you recognise it. You walk down the street whistling, and every now and then you let out your first ‘This is one on one, you and me, God! And it’s going great!’’
I wonder what does it mean when I feel that I failed as a writer, but decide not to ask her. After all, all roads get bumpy here and there. ‘I suppose the more you write about something, the biggest the desire to live it. Isn’t it so?
She looks at me as if wondering if I’m trying to find out her biggest secret —the secret of her aliveness. But rolls her eyes soon after. ‘Bullshit. Great writing comes from great living. This is why you don’t know how to write.’
I’m caught off-guard, and all I can do is pause and stare at her, stretching on the floor, smoking, smiling.
‘Because you lack intensity,’ she continues, knowing that I was waiting for an explanation, ‘because you don’t love your life, so life can’t love you back. You can’t turn such a dull existence into poetry. You can only make art out of beauty.’
This goes against everything I thought I knew about art. Stupefied, I ask her: ‘What about sadness?’
‘Who said sadness isn’t beautiful?’
‘How in the world is sadness beautiful?’ I shout, confused at her ability to lionize everything I run from.
She rolls over, gets up and comes sit on the sofa’s arm, next to me.
‘Take a good look at me.’ she whispers in my ear.

But when I take a good look at him, I realise that I can’t scare him. Not for long, anyway. The man’s got edge, even if I manage to take his confidence away every now and then. But he’s a lonely soul, I can see it in his eyes. He might be a puppet, but he is also the puppeteer. In his world, there’s no room left for doubt. If he starts doubting himself, he dies. His self-confidence is his only fuel and, artsy or not, he is still a beautiful human being that makes me wonder how can someone so different from me attract me so much.
I haven’t read his work. He hasn’t read mine either, I can tell. He avoids all talk about my book and tries to crayon me as the strong minded, crazy girl he sees behind this pose. Whatever makes me live, and write, and then live some more with the depth and density he thinks he sees, that’s what he is interested in. What makes me human, where my second hand hope comes from, what I make my decisions based upon – in fiction or live autobiography, which, on a second look, are one and the same.
There is good in this. It’s like a mind game at a first date, no preconceptions.
We’re strangers who seem to have been trapped in space and time – this room, this 3 a.m. is all we have.
So we cheat and we lie to pass the time, and wonder which one of us will give up first, who will be the first to take advantage of whom, who will be the first to tell the truth and nothing but the truth all the way.
For now, his breath smells like coffee and smoke. Mine is heavy.
I keep him guessing, and he draws me closer.
He asks me what is it that I don’t want to show the world, and begs me to show it to him.
I say that it’s everything, smile and remain evasive, ambiguous.
He thinks that I’m fresh and fantastic.
I think he is kind and gentle and take my cigarette back from between his fingers, to nervously pull a last smoke.
Soon, I’ll put my drink down and turn the lights on. I’ll wash my glass in the sink and hope to avoid all eye contact for a while.
It’ll take time until he figures that there is nothing on the inside as exciting as he thinks. I am like a veil that any light can shine through, but merely exists in the dark. In his light, I am bright orange, feverish, delirious and silky. But at times, I am opaque black. I didn’t take my time to contour a fixed personality. I don’t know what my definitions and status quos are. I can answer his every question about my soul, but I couldn’t tell him a thing about the girl who walks down the street in mere daylight, because I’ve never paid any attention to her.
He thinks I am a beautiful mystery.
I think that is a half-truth in any way you take it.