On Olives and Sake

Here I am again, sipping wine from the bottle, surrounded by the layers of take-out garbage that’s been piling around for a week now, this must be exam week.

It’s a Friday night, and I’ve guilt myself into staying home, but ended up sipping wine, smoking, dylanning and pondering endlessly about improbable questions of my own.

***

Her name has come up many times, too many for my own comfort, in the course of the last few weeks, in the most strange of coincidences. I still don’t know if this is a simple conspiracy of life, or is one of my own mind to deny me any ability to focus on my Database Theory textbook. One thing is certain though, the thought is here to stay.

When I set out to write anything about her my thoughts start to confuse reality and fiction. They start to confuse what really happened with what imaginary conversations and events I’ve made up in days like this one. I confuse what I wrote once about her, with what she really was.

A question she kept on dragging behind her was whether I did love her, or just wanted to love, and whether she did love me, or just wanted to be loved. I remember how grotesque the question and its whole premise was, I still do. Maybe my problem was, and apparently still is, that I’ve found love, in its most abstract shape, to be an entity completely independent of us people.

Don’t read too much into this, I am not dwelling over an end of a relationship. Not that one anyway, that one was bound to crash in the most painful of ways. Egypt and Japan are not even in the same continent and, I have no doubt, our worlds were much further apart.

Nonetheless, when you find out that you share a thought that is so transparent, like a dream, a thought so personal and so particular despite its many, many colors, when you share such a thought with someone, she becomes an integral part of it. She blends with the background, a color of her own, and comes back with every morning as that thought eats into your mind.

You burn bridges and then beat your head against the wall.

Oh what an noisy gruesome world we live in these days. What a terrible way to burn bridges by ignoring emails and removing people from your Facebook friends. Oh dear!

There was a time when I wrote letters everyday, much like Issian of Amin Maalouf’s Ports of Call. Letters that explained yesterday’s letter, and one’s that explained today’s. But unlike Issian, I did not mail them. They’re here. All these letters of madness that I wrote are here, as a comic and insightful testament to those days. They bring me sorrow because I was the one who wrote them, but mostly because I never put a stamp on them and mailed them.

***

She had the smile of Astarte, and eyes much like the sun. She had the passion of a million seas and the vengeances of a million humanities. Oh, what beautiful a color she’s made.