To my lover, who taught me the art of disappearing

To my lover, who taught me the art of disappearing

I walk over to the counter to redeem myself. It is 3 a.m. I do not know what I am looking for. I am not just looking for it, I very well intend to pay for it, even though my hair is unkempt and my clothes speak of a madness that never was. 

The drug store owner hands me a strip of yellow pills – the size of insect eggs.

One year into a life I never thought I would be living and I was a joyless, sexless, clueless nobody.

The drug store owner looks at me with eyes that scream – Run over to the bookstore next door and buy the Book of Love.

Its 3 a.m. Bookstores close, memories snap, love grows sour and all you are left with is bad timing.

He runs his hands over the sharp edge of the strip – What do you know of failing?

Before anything else, you had to know this – She was easy, easy to fall in love with.

What do you know of not wanting to be here? Not wanting to be you?

As my lover, you should know, it is a terrible time to talk about the economy. We are a faltering civilization and you can’t use it as an excuse to bail out on what we had.

The other day I read about the soaring ‘lipstick index’ – We are wining. We are ironically undefeated. 

Cloudy, gloomy days, days that beg you to dive headfirst into a peaceful slumber. These days have me thinking of you

I think of you waiting at the airport. That’s how I always picture you – nervous, alone, waiting, wanting to go, indifferent to goodbyes.

There are so many bits of you that need due consideration, you never cease to amaze me.

‘I’d date me,’ you’d say or something equally ridiculous, as you washed the very last of the dishes pouring a part of you down the sink.

Sometimes you’d cook for yourself and lay out a table for two even though you knew no one was coming. Because an empty plate made you feel safe, because I knew you better than that, because you could eat your words and never have anything to say ever again.

Metaphors never happen, they are just there for you to pick up. Among those many things, I can’t even name the ones I miss the most –

A half open window, an unmade bed, an untouched cup of tea, garbage bags lying at the door, waiting to be thrown out, the smell of guilt.

When you can't subscribe, you bastardize.

“There is plenty of ground beneath rock bottom,” who said that? I did, when I was 17 and drunk on life and a slew of thoughts that got me floored at my worst hours.

I’m 25 now and the only inspiration to get me out of bed is really bad coffee at office and it took me 10 minutes to come up with that.

Is that what it is? The price of not being exceptional? The price of hanging in there? How about a nice big cup of stupid instead?

I’ve been through what you’d call a hazy few months: A whiff of controversy. Imagined scandal. Testosterone. Don’t get me started on feminism. Well earned arrogance at the end of the day. The price of being professional.

11 am: I skim through my laundry list of clients. This is how we operate, stock prices swell up, and data spills over. Coffee cups pile up. Breakfast bars are a thing.

Lunch is peaceful. Finally, there is some wind in my hair.

Sometimes I read up on oil and sustainability, look up Latin words, Reuters, China, Pfizer.

I make a mealy mess forking deals. Sometimes I clean up. Sometimes I am told that I am being played. Weird men you know, like to start their days with quotes.

Have I lost my mojo? Does the pleasure of drinking wine at 8 pm in the perfect glass outweigh events that led me to ask myself that question?

On Saturdays I drag my working class ass to the park, sometimes I scribble. Scraps of paper do it for me like fancy notebooks never could or would.

You have to realize that I am a straight shooter and that I won’t shut up.

I am such a dog waiting to grow wild,

I am holding my breath, watching the sun

I am dreaming of all the mistakes I’ve made

I am sick of his gold rimmed notebooks and his copybook charm

I am trying to stretch my imagination of this city.

I am trying to be gone, I am minding the gaps

I am trying to reach out, I am hanging on by a thread. 

Of Lullaby Springs and Damien Hirst ( Additional notes from the under deck - no convenience charge )

Natasha Choukkar – on why she is good at what she does and why she hasn’t been doing enough of it.

So these are "literary" notes from the under deck that have been scribbled on planes, buses, parks, outside grand museum stairs and motel note pads, sometimes fancier notepads and Pierre Cardin’s (with a cold metallic sheen) that don’t really subscribe to our generation.

And as I am writing this from a sublime and terribly gorgeous place in Whitefield's where the rain trickles down the window pane every ten minutes and skylights brighten up the room at dawn, I am thinking of all the things I swallowed up on my way here: 

These were the things I did take a very long time to learn about myself:

• I have vacation issues
• I deliberately like to torture myself by carrying the wrong books on my journey to help me get to write. Suicidal, ain't it?
• My life is not a Roy Lichenstein version of Sleeping Girl, it really isn’t. My life revolves more around every conceivable Jasper John’s you could ever find. Some people confuse it to be something like Degas and his drying women. Like seriously? Get a life.
• I can’t sleep on most nights – too much coffee and the fear of being rendered redundant gnawing at me.
• This is not a place to soul search
•  Having fun is hard work and you of all people should know that (Yes you, D)
•   I don’t have shiny hair either ( I’m talking to you D, don’t look away)

    Here’s what I have been doing when I haven’t been eating weird meat– reading up on Damien Hirst. Hirst is a man who sold his thoughts. Period. Love him or hate him for that. So you could blame Hirst for me throwing up stuff about me which shouldn't be surprisingly shocking if you've known me already and come this far.

    We live in a society with questionable moral ethics; need we blame our artists for their questionable artistic ethics?  I am trying after all to be almost as transparently fair as I can be. (D?)

Woman, are we ready to talk about your day yet?

I am glad I get to you, in bits and pieces though, I still get to you.

I recite my thoughts like a hymn waiting to unfold, itchy at the edges. My life somehow makes sense when sprawled across a post it.

I define my own tools and I define my failure and I notice.

Anger and creative hindsight – these are the tools with which I learn best. I guess I am not ashamed of being angry anymore, or bored or indifferent. I hung my shame out to dry and wither in the hot summer sun.

Having done that I now trust all the unfairness in the world to shake things up and stir up a storm.

If I see a beautiful bald woman and I can’t write about her – I call it a failure. I define my own failures.

I did see her today; she was the most beautiful woman I saw in a very long time. She was dressed all summery ready to swallow the sun if she had to, with piercing eyes that could take or leave all.  I realized it wasn’t her beauty that wrecked me; it was something that clamored back at me when she looked me in the eye. 

Where does she get that perverse yet astonishingly satishfying freedom from? - the one thing that I have been looking for all my life.

Happy fucking woman’s day – I mutter under my breath.

I don’t get what Woman’s Day is about – yes I am grumpy and no I didn’t dress up; yes I didn’t do my hair. Yes I got drunk, yes I’m in love, no I don’t do God anymore, or marriage – the institution repels me, suffocates me. I could do yoga, I could never give up meat, I am not a limited edition.

I sweat the details, for all practical purposes I adore the wrong kind of men, adulthood won me over when I was five.

I am not very excited about being a woman, probably because I am a feminist and I chose to run to the man I love to help me fix things I broke in the first place.

But I refuse to be a Stepford wife, I refuse to be told right and wrong because who let you decide all that stuff in the first place anyway.

Why be told you’ve come a long way? Isn’t that limiting ambition? Why be told you are lucky to be where you are?  Is that what we are going to do – keep telling ourselves how lucky we are? That we weren’t burnt or scarred or raped? Is that what we want to live off for the rest of our lives – luck? And what if we happen to be not so lucky one of these days?  Would we have run out of luck?

I get what tradition is all about – I however fail to understand what losing freedom is all about.

That kind of submission is worse than rectal smuggling.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot – I notice. I notice the way you hold your coffee mug – I think it is truly fucked up. 

Yours Sincerely,

More bad grammar and lazy writing.

Why did everything have to be about running away?

Treadmills.  Coffee Mugs. Amazingly long showers. My day just began.

I always wake up thinking that once in life I’d have the serious courage to break free, but it is 11:15 now and courage only a metaphor, even better an excuse to get me out of bed.

This is my little world of no paper shredders, bad coffee and very little hope. I welcome it, nonetheless. Yes, paper shredders would’ve made a difference.

What’s worrying is that I had an opinion you know – an opinion on whats wrong with the world, Aaron Swartz, Global Warming, free content, tweeting, gang rapes and mass murders. A fucking opinion you know?

Well right now all I am left with is no paper shredders.

We are an army of angry little feminists – self wrought with damage and brilliance, drowning in a whirlpool of the wrong kind of men and it never felt so fucking right. But maybe, that is more or less a part of the plan – the grander plan that leads me to where I ought to be.

So then there is that conclusion that doesn’t entirely convince me: I am my own worst enemy.