ON SURPRISES...

Now I’ve spent a lot of time in my life thinking about how it would wind up in the end. And from what I’ve gathered talking to other like-minded people, it seems to be a pretty normal thing to do – you know, speculate about love, and money, and friends, and how many of your wishes you’d end up fulfilling (‘Dude, even if there’s nothing else, I’m going to get that Lamborghini!’), and how you’d die (one of my friends, the kind that had all the charm of a suicidal writer, wanted to inject himself with rat poison on his thirty third birthday, I personally prefer cancer – painful as it would be, the movies make it look really classy), and how many people would show up at your funeral (I can never decide whether I want a lot of people, or just three). These were apparently so typical that it was acceptable to get drunk and ‘share’ (it’s in inverted commas as a reference to things people do at support groups, which is often what drunk sessions become).

But aside of these I thought about other things too – really, I thought a lot. LOT.

I thought about finding the perfect girl, getting everything right with her, finding love in the smallest of things. Sometimes it was really mushy – straight out of a teenage fiction novella – like spending lazy Sunday afternoons with ice cream and a book, getting married, having children (I’d thought of number and names), raising them, and being proud at their piano recitals and graduation ceremonies.

I thought at other times of never finding love at all. Of meeting people who seemed almost perfect, but being unable to live in a compromise – and eventually turning to art or something like that. I sometimes really wanted to be more like that the friend with the charm of a suicidal writer. I imagined walking in and out of people’s lives, getting disappointed, and finally surviving only because some friends had decided to stand by me. These stories usually ended with me being alone, and when asked why I was alone, I’d invariably answer cryptically ‘That, my dear, is a story for another day.’

I thought of a life that would make Tony Stark and Barney Stinson envious – money, women, Italian suits and Scotch. I thought of joining the armed forces, leading a life of such hardship and danger that these romantic visions would drown themselves out (does this count as a Catch 22? Imagining something that would block your imagination?). I’ve thought of chucking everything and living like a vagabond – something like Nolan’s Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins – apparently in search of worldly inspiration. I’ve thought of publishing a book. The number of times I’ve imagined myself as the protagonist of a film or a book is not even funny, saying climactic dialogues and turning away as imaginary explosions raged behind me. Basically, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking, and the attention to detail is well, staggering sometimes.

In the end, life still manages to surprise me. No matter what I cook up in my head – the stories, the details, the names of my future kids, the title of my future book, and the complicated cancer that eventually kills me (though I remain miraculously cheerful through it, and die with a smile ‘embracing death like an old friend’) – life has this uncanny way of throwing something I could never have expected. It’s like waiting for someone to pass the ball to Klose and keeping your eye on him, only to realize that Podolski came in from the left and scored while you were looking somewhere else.

And here’s the strange part: although it surprises you, or rather, takes a piss on the parade you imagined for yourself, life is very rarely surprising. In that, although its rarely what you thought it would be, it responds in the most mundane way ever. Things are not as good as you thought, nor as bad, they’re just average. You imagine yourself getting ecstatic for the A and despondent for the C, but heck, you get a B, and then what?

This post had a point. But um, I’m going to save face by getting all nerdy here – because I’m good at that. The brain loves making the individual feel important (either the hero or the martyr) because it’s an extended part of the whole self-preservation instinct. What the brain cannot stand, and consequently what most individuals can’t come to terms with is being ordinary, dispensable, not mattering, and being just another B in a huge crowd of B’s.

So hey, here’s to a higher level of self-awareness. I’m going to imagine myself never publishing a book, getting into an arranged marriage, falling out of love as often as in love, making as much money as the national average for my level of education, and driving the most commonplace car on the street. Because ordinary is not surprising, and one of the (many) ways to make sure life doesn’t catch you off guard is to plan for the routine. So simple no?

I’m not very good at saving face am I?

Oh look, behind you, near the couch! There's a surprise to distract you.

A MOMENT OF TRUTH

You look deep into her eyes

She is saying something

But you aren’t listening

Looking, just looking

She stops talking

Lifts her eyebrows as if to ask

‘What is it?’

What is it indeed in those eyes

You say something unspoken

At least, you hope you said it

But she must have heard it

For she looks back

Into your eyes

Deeply, so deeply

You move closer to her

Without moving

Without realizing

She comes closer

Without coming closer

In that frozen moment

There is poetic motion

And your mind

Is perfectly blank

Knowing nothing

Feeling nothing

As she comes closer still

Until your lips touch hers

Without touching

You can feel her breath

Caress your mouth

You can feel her lips

Or at least, you think you can

And just a moment later

As you are about to move

One last time, closer

Close enough

You blink

And in that blink

You see someone

Someone else

Hear another voice

Call your name

You stop

And look away

Away from her

She moves backwards

Or at least, appears to

Without moving

The distances appear again

And broken words are spoken

Coarse humour is made

But inside

Inside you hurt

Knowing that a moment

Of purity, love and truth

Is lost

Forever

SHEEPISH

I smile as I catch myself looking after her, as she walks by oblivious to my attention.

Look deeply into her eyes, as she comes closer to me. As she passes by I can’t help but soak in her long lashes, and after that how her hair curls behind her ears. She crosses me completely, and I find myself lost in the bouncing curls that follow her bobbing head in rhythm with her crisp steps.

She stops at a table two tables away from me, asks the couple seated what they’d like to have this evening, notes it down with a small flourish on a small notepad, and starts walking back to the café, passing right by me again, and my eyes subtly doing the same thing all over again. I briefly try imagining what her handwriting would be like.

And I smile at myself, and I sigh. I had never thought that I’d come and sit at a small table outside an unknown café on the pavement of a street in a remote village of a Greek island day after day after day only to see a waitress pass me by, yet here I was. I had never thought that I’d want to talk to a woman who could only converse in one language, on that I didn’t speak, and yet here I was.

And I smile at myself and I sigh. I finish my coffee, and think of ordering another. But that would be silly – one simply does not have three cups before dinner. But as I notice her pass me by again, I have this burning urge to attract her attention, even if it meant doing something incredibly silly and childish. But I stop myself, and just in time. I suppose the best course of action was to call for the bill, and do just that. As she bends forward to place a sandwich and salad for the couple two tables away from me, I raise my arm to catch her eye.

She looks at me, and smiles as if to say ‘I’ll just be over’, and in that moment, caught between a sudden instinct to flash a James Bond smile and an equally strong impulse to avoid smiling a sheepish smile, I give her a smile laced with the most potent sheepishness.

It makes her giggle though. She smiles back at me once more, and this time, when I return in kind, it is a better kind. I pay the bill and left, which was less dramatic a process than I had imagined. Even so, I leave knowing I’ll be back tomorrow. And who knows, the sheepish one might just trump the James Bond.

ALONE

There are those times, when my thoughts wander off on a journey of their own. Times like when I sit alone over a cup of coffee in the sunset, or when I am working on routine tasks that don’t need my focus. My thoughts travel on this winding circuitous route, through memories and facts and musings and secrets, eventually, to you.

And I can’t help but think about you all over again. Sometimes I go over memories I shared with you, the time we sat alone late into the night outside your door and talked, the time we planned to travel together to another town but it never worked out, the time I called you from in the middle of a play to tell you that you should have come. And then, where the memory ends, I just make up a story as I go along – from sitting talking outside your house, we make a crazy plan to go watch the sunrise over a lake a hundred miles away, and the plan to travel together to another city does work out and we have the time of our lives, and when I call you from in the middle of the play, you ask me to turn around and you are sitting in the row behind me.

And then I wander deeper about you. I remember images, of your smile, of your hair, of your tears, and your frown. And I’ll remember how I felt about you, but never quite told you. My mind tries to create its own story where I do tell you everything, and I play it again and again in my head imagining different reactions from you every time.

I’ll go on to remember the awkward silence in the car, as I drove you to the airport. And I’ll remember that moment when you walked in, and I stayed out, and I didn’t call out to you, and you didn’t look back. Another story sparks off on its own, sometimes I imagine you running back into my arms, and other times I imagine that you look back shake your head and carry on nonetheless.

I look down at the coffee in my hand the sunset in my eyes, or at my computer screen at what I was supposed to be doing, and shake myself back into the present. I dare to remember what you looked like one last time, before I finish my coffee, or start with the next round of operations on my computer.

And the last thing I think on the subject is my own lonliness.

CATCHING UP

For a long time I thought the most daunting sight I would ever face was a blank sheet of paper, and an inked pen hovering an inch above it, but no words to connect the two.

That was until the time I found myself staring at the screen of my cell phone, her contact number displayed, and my thumb hovering an inch above the little green button that would place the call.

My head was a storm of thoughts, my gut the hapless occupant of a rollercoaster, and my heart an oil drill. Should I call her? Should I not? What would I say? Would I be able to say anything at all? No, it’s safer not to call. I decided to put the phone back in my pocket, but realized after an eternal moment that I was still clasping it in my hand, my thumb hovering as before.

I’m not sure what it was really – a sudden rush of energy, or a sudden setting in of fatigue – but my thumb fell on the button, and the sounds of a phone ringing could be heard through the ear piece. Gingerly, I brought the phone to my ear, too afraid of what was to follow to breathe easily.

It rang. It rang some more. It rang until the answering machine kicked in, and there was that pleasant voice of hers that I had never quite forgotten.

“Hi, you've reached Christie’s phone. I’m not in right now, so you know what to do after the beep.” Beep. Was it my turn to talk already?

“Christie? Um, hi, Dave here – from college, if you remember that is. Um, call me back? My number’s 88767801, looking forward to hearing-” There was a click on the other end, as I realized that someone had picked up the phone.

“Dave?”

“Uh yeah, hi. I didn’t know you were around, how-”

“David Johnson?”

“Yes, the same.” I said after a hesitant pause. “Christie Roberts?” There was a chuckle at the other end.

“Yes, Christie Roberts. How are you Dave? Where were you?”

Catching up was slightly awkward at first, giving each other explanations about where we had been, and then justifying why neither of us had called. Then it got better, when we started filling each other in on what had happened with us, and how she hated her boss, and how I had quit my job, and how her father had passed away a year ago, and how I was doing the rounds looking for someone to publish my manuscript. It got comfortable from that point, when she insisted on choosing a pseudonym for me and I offered to have a little ‘chat’ with her boss, when she said she’d better go to the kitchen and make herself some coffee, when I said catching a slight across the country to come see her seemed to be a pretty good idea.

“You can’t be serious Dave! It’s almost sun rise – can’t you see the sky turning blue?”

“All the better, the pilots will have better visibility!”

“Shut up, I’ve got to get to work in a couple of hours.”

“Call in sick, do whatever, don’t go today. I’m packing a bag – how many sets should I carry?”

“Dave! Get back into bed!”

“Three shirts should be fine don’t you think? Oh and my toothbrush!”

“While you’re at it, pack you shaving kit – I hate you with stubble.”

“Alright then – keep the phone down, I’ll catch the first flight out, and see you at the airport okay?”

“I cannot believe it Dave. This is not good, not good at all.”

“Keep the phone down Christie, I need my other hand to tie my shoelaces!”

“You cut the call Dave.”

“No, you first.” And that went on. And on. And on. Until I found myself a headset, and plugged it to my phone.

I finally cut the call when my flight was about to take off. I sat on that flight thinking about her, what it would be like to see her again. And I caught myself thinking that a call waiting to be connected would never quite be as daunting as a blank sheet of paper again.