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[noyonayana]

Forestories #1: What is in a Name?

Long long ago, in a distant land, there was a mythical forest that lived, isolated from everything else in that world, popping up one day as a sudden dream, labyrinthine in its paths and ways and far older than reckoned the stories and legends that had sprung up in fear and awe of it. These legends often as not would speak of the many creatures and beings that had made a home there and I do not use the contrived hyperbolic when I say that there is no end to the number of stories written by adventurous and desperate storytellers who have gone forth bravely questing in discovery of that land, and who have written what we know so far about the Forest and its many attractions and ominous tourist traps, often one and the same, its plant life and creatures, beings and spirits, its haunted and otherwise mystical places and their powers and dangers, their allegorical troubles and treasures and so on and on in volumes of hard drives.  Even I am not god enough to catalog all these stories. 

In my own modestly adventurous travels though, I saw a cottage on the outskirts, the home of a couple awaiting their firstborn and it seemed to me that the truth and allegory derived from their life, would make excellent subject material and a unique and substantial grounding perspective with which to navigate my first foray into the annals of Forestories. And so I offer to you, my readers, the stories of this obviously ‘Adam and Eve’-esque couple, told to preserve and share the meaning of their lives for anyone who might care to know. And who might then walk away with something, anything of value or at the very least, a comforting hug and an escape from the troubles and times of personal despair. This endeavour is indeed an amateur undertaking, where the young make up for the tried and tested experience of the wizened by venturing boldly where none have gone before, thus making the very mistakes that teach experience in later days. 

So in order to start our journey, we must first find our way there, travel hundreds of imaginary miles, cross vast oceans and mountains, indeed many thereof and pass through the portal of language, leaving behind our own world and hovering lightly over theirs. Our first story is that of the forest. We must once again set about opening for this familiar song and drama, begin with a little stylized creation myth beginning and narrate the humble home brewed backstory for the Khanolin Greenemere, the original magical forest . 

Everywhere, the world is what we make of it, it is as vast as stretches our horizon, it stops where our perception, for whatever reason, can see no further. Things beyond that might as well not exist and most haven’t, to us at least. But to you dear reader, who are where I left you last, hovering over the vast green swathes of this Forest-world, only you can see the boundaries of this land, only you can say that it is not such a big or otherwise formidable looking forest at all. You might even feel the first pangs of disappointment at such a barely encouraging first glimpse. Such distance can generate only such perception. On the thick and well obscured ground, when clomping through the overflowing marshy undergrowths and across the sprawling treetops, Greenemere Khanol is an old old place sustaining the kind of living and life that has always been treated with the instinctive reverence that builds up amidst mobs and in distant towns, awe of something that we cannot understand and which beckons to us time and again. It is best to speak of this place in enigmas and parables; if one will forgive the initial cliches, their well-trodden but universal meaning will become more evident as one continues reading. 

The Khanol is unspeakably dense, the famous Who, the scholar famously described it as, “bigger on the inside”, and we have not yet had a single explorer map it from within in its entirety and come out. The kind of place where all sorts of trees and animals make their living, which, for those that may be interested, include specimens of those that we have scientifically accounted for in our botany and veterinary books, and those from our fictional and mythical records and by the estimation of our oldest almost deified philosophers, roughly about 47% of everything living that lies beyond our collective human imagination. Which it must be said is relatively childish and  in comparison to the other minds we have touched and felt, spread all over the cosmos, but I’m still quoting his venerated Who-minence. Most of these fantastical beings never leave the inner depths and I might employ the use of statistics one last time to say that the most popular estimation of the percentage of verifiable information we have over the Forest and its inhabitants is about 12%.  That does make for very interesting speculation but I have yet to see that conversation rise above that level of truth and I certainly do not endorse that number nor yet that scientific approach to the mysteries of this Forest. I will soon expound more clearly on my reservations but as for any current certainty about the Forest, all that should remain prefigured in mind is that none can be found anywhere else in the world that live and die and have the Khanol Greenemere for their ancestral home.

 And what an expansive and bewildering riddle of a home it is with so little known about its origins and current inhabitants and properties. Thus goes my first story                                                      about the Forest. 

What is in a name? What is a name capable of suggesting? To children, a name is given to commence the process of Identification and to herald the creation of their self-hood. Gods and places, inanimate objects and symbolic beings also have names but fundamentally their naming is an act of claiming, done by those not themselves, to give them identities and stories that act as their characterizing and symbolic signposts in Language. So that becomes a referrant in speaking of them and signifies doing so but in the handling of the more sensitive poets, a name of a thing can be praise and an honouring of virtue, ability and story that is celebrated and in any other way, it becomes a word that seems to characterize their particular property of being, something that takes on a shadow of the thing it denotes. It is the first step to remembering them in time and also very importantly, the first step in a ritual process of the educated, partaking in trade and business with meaning and symbolism in reference to these things. For this reason, I have not and do not intend in these my records, to refer to the Forest by any other name than the one I have given to it. The word Forest itself is its species designator, a useful characterisation which immediately makes evident, the barest quality of the thing we are discussing. After that, my own name tells us everything we need to draw out a loose fitting and distanced outline of this story’s most significant character. 

I chose to speak of the Forest as the “Greenemere Khanol”, and these papers are both the first time it has publicly been called in this way and an introduction to my own studies and perception of its being; and I’m not unaware of the admittedly vain attempt to write myself deeper into this story. Eitherway, Greenemere is a Celtic word- a sound from the old stories which refers to fertility and a more or less green-coloured verdant life that was often used to describe many forests of the myths, older and thus lost lands which luckily for their death, escaped the ravages of time and the greed of man’s machines alike. It is a hopeful yet fey word, a call for older, more savage and natural times that is in truth, a lament for all that is seen to be missing now and I thought it perfect to describe the dangerous and bewitching beauty of this land. “Khanol”, derived from the Persian word- Kanolhissa is a curiously feminine word, the formal poetic way to refer to an Oasis that is seen to come to us just as the desert seems almost to have defeated us. An unexpected boon when all seems to be lost. It has been used by many poets to refer to love, women and friendship, a sudden reversal of fortune, a reprieve of new life and beginnings just when it seemed that our death was looming over the horizon with his mossy sickle in hand. 

And thus we have our setting. A not entirely new but still, beautiful idea of unfettered life somehow magically bursting forth in full bloom in the midst of a vacuum of nothingness, a void around it stretching for leagues in each direction. The Khanol in its unity is the only living entity, or at least one of any consequence in its world. But how can that be? One cannot make anything from nothing, there is always something to come from and something to become and time is the engine or rather the fuel spent in living that separates the two. When there is a logical progression between the two, we call our understanding of the same Science. and when there simply isn’t, it is Magic or as I prefer to call it, the Imagination. But howsoever, there is always something behind the curtain. So who is the master of the Khanol, that created it from nothing? Is it there for some divine or otherwise cosmic purpose? And what could that conceivably be and conversely, have we actually figured it out in in some or any of our retellings of its creation and current life? My own submission to that list of questions is- are we too human to be able to understand it? Is purpose and meaning and our measuring scales of time, causation and justice, simply too minute and human a conception of this dense deep unsounding vastness? 

Thus thunderously, I end my first story. In the next part of this series, we will meet our human protagonists and see for yourselves, through their eyes their little cottage on the outskirts of the Forest. And don’t worry, I understand perfectly the consequences of my ideas on our beloved Forest, I don’t intend to let myself do any lighter than marvel you completely with this, my narrative accounts, of my serious theoretic study and rigorous physical exploration, (and all that at my age!) of the Greenemere Khanol, one of the last mysteries left to our current lot. 

[noyonayana]

Exercise # 1

So who wins? those that get to live. Thus, I won, although tis a hollow victory because you didn’t win anything good, you just get to live with the memories of what happened and what your part was in all of it. what sort of life can come after that?

There is no sky, nothing to see upwards. only smoke, all air is grey-coloured now and that is what it will always be. and all around you is carnage, death, mutilation and by your feet a network of blood runs and gurgles, teeming from all the fallen to join together to form rivers and ponds where the grounds gives way.  You cannot do anything, look anywhere, step one step without getting closer to losing grip over yourself, to giving up control to something else that is sitting in your spot in your home: the trigger is not the bodies themselves, kill enough and you become desensitized to motion and the deed, to the blood, the innards, guts and the slop of humanity and its waste just lying about, strewn everywhere, disobeying its natural order and so far away from its proper place. It is your own traitorous mind, that looks at the torn and bloodied and otherwise rendered unrecognizable uniform on a mangled corpse and thinks that it might be your friend’s. Can you recognise your old squadron mate in cannon fodder, make out a familiar mark or tattoo on his body or his name and ranking somewhere on his outfit if it looks that way? that, those thoughts are enough to unhinge something crucial; then your mind runs away somewhere leaving you alone and surrounded by unfamiliar monsters, unknown house guests in your head to deal with what you’re processing; they are unfamiliar because you had never gone that far deep inside or wherever they came from but once you do, you recognise something in these new thoughts. you start to come to terms with the fact that it is your mind saying them, you revel in a new connection and different unknown untested ideas in a place that seems to be about killing everything old and known.

so do you touch it, the corpse that might be your friend’s. You kick out his burning hot legs from under him and straighten him out. Do you wrap something around your hands to protect yourself and gingerly attempt to turn over his body in respect or is it better to bloody yourself uncovered, unprotected in his departed humanity, in the physicality of his abandoned human vessel? and maybe that is more honest. Perhaps only then can you look his family in the eye and tell them the lie about his honorable and admirable death in the name of country, god, faith, whatever excuse paid for and justified this particular battleground. So you can spout the rhetoric of whichever fund pays for that medal of honour, courage, faith, resilience, whatever excuse and symbol of humanity that we get in exchange for giving up the real thing in totality? Since it is not my first such corpse, my hands move automatically, my brain functioning on half power, my emotions fully cut off, some part of me unrecognisable to myself and the other part silenced. If you could see my eyes, they’d be overbright. an inhuman light shining like a beam of life cutting through the smoke of death, shining brightly on corpse and soon-to-be corpse alike, reflecting off the field’s red veins,  illuminating in muted colours, an overworked mechanical  consciousness, that severed from its conscience still records every image and sound relentlessly in preparation for all the nights to come from now on. I knew what would happen. and yet i came. maybe war only revealed what was already broken.  

But this soldier is not done yet. I have been tasked to bring back mementos from this war, if not my friends themselves. I have made an oath to someone. I can’t remember or feel anything beyond these directives. I only know I must do it or die trying. I have been looking, time has no meaning, but I cant see my friends. I have searched many corpses and found friends but too late. Yet I hunt. For some reason, I cant ignore the directive to bring back souvenirs. If I ignore that and run away, my brain jolts at that inhuman thought, I think I will die. Whatever remains of me, whatever can live after the complete unhinging, I will not remain. 

So I try but I think all of my unit have died. and I am carrying many souvenirs on my back. I stop at yet another body that seems familiar, something itching in me to check this one out too for there I might find a friend I have forgotten. This is one of the more intact ones, most others are just a few limbs or horrible expressions but this body is male and he is very tall and seems important, with his 3 stars and thick boots that even here scream of some other value that died with its owner, a death by multiple stabbings. I fall down to my knees next to his face to look closely at his features and uniform but suddenly there is an aura of smell coming from him that even I cant stand too long and I don’t want to puke anymore so my hands search, frantically, ripping apart his uniform for any keepsake or memento that might still be on him and I pat down wherever there is clothing still only onto a half charred and already decomposing human body. He must have been dead for sometime, I wonder what is the time between the start of the war and where I am now and soon in his exposed innards, I can see the telltale white slimey things on him already that signal new life. This is a veritable feast for them, they must grow here and flourish, whole species and dynasties gorging their life cycles on single bodies and singular wars. They might even have minor evolutionary cycles during the course of each battle. They may not be similar in formation and behaviour to those that inhabit other battlefields. and maybe the space of time between another carnage is unfelt to them, what if they can hibernate after such a feast like bears do? But only perhaps and I wonder what do I know of maggots? Did I study science? 

Did he? I search for his name and find it: Eal Ma. This is as much as I can make of it, his captain’s uniform is drenched in his blood and it is crusty, sticking to my fingers as I search through him. I remember my friend from school, memories and old feelings coming back as my mind comes across new information, seeing more of the battleground on his body and it sifts through my memories and points out the connections between my old partner in crime and the body in front of me. I think this guy stole my prom date or he stole something from me but I don’t remember old anger, maybe we were just close enough for it not to matter or distanced enough for the pain to have faded without a scar. Simple connections are easier to handle.  

I don’t remember too well. My name is a word on my uniform, not a familiar notion. But I don’t care now, because under his left shoe, over his sock is a girl’s bracelet worn around the ankle. The skin around his ankle is still soft and soft skin makes me think of Tara. My mind skips ahead purposefully. I’m sure its called something similar but anklet doesn’t seem English. That can’t be right, right, Mister? you look back at your friend, but he doesn’t seem familiar... as far as you are aware you never made friends with a burnt corpse before.. now. hahaha life is good for some things. I get up off Mister, nod hastily in his direction, a parody of respect and move on. Thank you, friend. I wish I had you still now, I wish I could have helped you, I wish I wasn’t alone to face this battlefield by myself, to drag along with me this morbid collection of memories, sharing my burden lightening it but why did you have to fight on the other side? Strange. 

I don’t have answers. but I am a soldier, I don’t need to. I remember my promises. I will bring back the bag of memories and give it to the families. and that means I will have gone home again and my parents greeted me and put me back in bed after some hot food and I can close my eyes finally and drop vigil. and sleep and who knows after that. But for now, I spot my next friend and robotically, I hoist my sack more closely over my shoulder and I make my steady way to the next rung of the deep abyss.  

[noyonayana]

I’m home sick for arms that don’t want to hold me

jaychathu16  (via wnq-writers)

[noyonayana]

I'm trying not to hide

 I am really trying. I’m attempting to face up to my fears and my desires. I’m trying to own up to the fact that I am only human and as such susceptible to the fallacies that my nature has in store for me. I find though that I don’t want actually to face up to my fears. They are too big and too wild for me. It is like daring yourself to look into Medusa’s eyes because you tell yourself she’s just a myth and so are her powers, but how many of us will look into her eyes? … I know I’m not. 

And the truly sad part is today, yesterday and tomorrow make no difference to me. It is all starting to become a bit of a blur and I feel like I’m giving in to a naturally misanthropic , existential presence while I ‘should’ be out embracing my youth and power and intelligence. I feel like an old crone, with too many children to count, having yet another baby all the while knowing that she should have died in the war… though I’ll admit even I think it’s strange that I’m feeling like that.    

I was sitting in the bus one day and listening to some music when all of a sudden, time slowed down for me. I saw all these old, sad- looking women sitting in front of me, with huge bags and crying children on their laps, going to the market to get cheap tomatoes and suddenly, I was one of them.  With an alcoholic husband and 5 idiotic children to go home to. With no prospect of true happiness and no Gandalf coming to take me on an adventure.

And the best part is that I’m actually quite a normal person. I’m just going through a minor and very common quarter-life crisis which will probably abate as soon as I hit my early 20′s and then I’ll really start partying with old, grey hair and slowing reflexes and I’ll get a small job in a quiet town. Probably get married. Have a few kids. Drown in a few liters of alcohol and stop breathing one day… But I’ll have died long before that. I’ll have died the minute I convince myself to not fight for something because of my claptrap I’ve ‘intellectualized’ up. I’ll have died the minute I start to prefer the company of my cat to the human I’m hopelessly in love with because it’s easier to profess love to a dumb animal than it is to the undeserving prick (read: human) who is ‘setting fire to my loins’. (I dared myself to put that there).          

I am sitting in front of my laptop, hunched down and wiping away fake tears, slowly trying to lock away forever on the inter web pieces of my soul that have caused me the most duress in all my glorious 19 years of existence and I am not afraid of writing this- I don’t want to know why. I am filled with absolutely no curiosity and have no energy left off from my feeling everything that I do on a daily basis to siphon it into understanding why I feel what I feel. I simply, beautifully don’t care and it feels wonderful to say so… I’ll just blame it on society or religion if I’m asked. I usually do that anyway. 

[noyonayana]

Manderley

Dear Jolene (Like the song, yes), 

I’m thinking of old mackintoshes; of those wonderful old phones they used to have with all those wires that went into nowhere; I’m thinking of the blinding cobwebs that wound themselves around every nook and cranny at home... and the house. I remember, every time I would think about it, I'd think of that old, gothic novel- Rebecca by Du Maurier and that first sentence that would always give me the chills-“Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again”…

I don't know why I write to you anymore… But it is raining now. And it seems my penmanship and my ability to word-vomit are intricately connected to the rain… I'm lying. I write well and mostly to you when it thunders and lightnings because it reminds me of you… You, with your destructive path and your murderous ways and your walking all over everyone and anything that caught your fancy.  

It’s become almost dreamlike, my life that is. I get up every day and do my work, read about murder in the paper, kick some arse at school, but at night, when I'm sitting down to some nostalgic 90’s serial, I can't even remember a single interesting thought I had; when I try to think of someone different I met or saw in the café down my road which has become my haunt, they slip from my memory, just like those sweaty, almost-scary dreams one has toward 3 in the morning that one can't ever remember later… Maybe I should run away too like you did.Go to some small city whose name I can't pronounce and set up a small apothecary. It'll be a little life but a different one. And, I find myself craving these little differences and pleasures now more with you gone than ever before.  

I went back to ‘Manderley’ yesterday. I have some money saved up and I think I'll buy the house. I know what you'll say- bad decisions, thinking with your heart not your head, silly memories, life and moving on, karma… I've thought of them all and I still will though. Those rickety stairs, the sounds of the house ‘settling’ at night, the kitchen that somehow always smelled of apple pie, the attic with that wonderful trunk of old costumes from the last century, the windy trees and the bereft sea nearby that always created such a wonderful ‘set’ for our photos and our secret trysts. I can hear you laughing right now- ahh, me, aren't you saying? ‘But then she was always the more emotional and attached one… she hasn’t changed a bit’. You're wrong. I have and that’s why I need Manderley. I need to have something to hold on to… some memory, some souvenir, some memento of a past that is slipping away from me.    

 Do you remember our first kiss? It’s imprinted in my memory, with a grace and passion that still has the ability to shock me, even now, ages from thence. Your mum had just made us some pie, and we'd taken some extra in a tin, packed some orange juice and walked up to our secret, hidden, “I'll kill you if you tell anyone about this” cave. And with the breeze and the sweetness going down my throat and that wonderful sea to look at, it only seemed natural for me to turn and kiss you. I'm so glad you kissed me back. The only remedy for being in love is contamination… Bite the one that you love and hope that in the full moon, they will turn with you too. And together, you shall rule the midnight forests…  

As you have probably guessed, I miss you more than the earth misses the heat of the sun after a cold day. Come back to me. Because after all this time, I'm still into you.

Bises,

You know who 

[noyonayana]

Le Silence

The rain pelted down on the windows and the closed doors of my coppery old house and suddenly, after a long time, I feel more alive and active than ever. What is it about the heavens bearing down in anger (or is actually lust?) upon our mortal souls that seem to make delighted children of so many of us? 

I'm now sitting down in my old chair in front of my old desk and I feel the room’s resentment at not having been used in such a long time. I, that would sit in front of my desk for hours every day, writing because the words needed an out or twiddling with my old typewriter, the only memento I can keep of a father that wanted a son. And, I’m sorry. I truly am sorry that I couldn't go inside that room in so long but.. when you’re old and decrepit and waiting for the man with the long cloak, you do all you can to avoid painful memories.. 

And those memories.. I can still smell the slight burn of the roasted meat as it slid down my throat. I can still taste that forbidden elixir, that drink of the gods that I used to love so much, that champagne  that would go down so easily.. But most of all, I remember the lights, the sway of the nubile, young bodies as they danced to the latest music and the ecstatic smiles of the people invited.. Oh, yes, I knew how to throw a party- and the best part? I was young and beautiful. Jeune et Jolie and my world knew no bounds.. an upcoming writer, a talented host with a gift for throwing parties that no one would forget in a hurry and la pièce de résistance? I was La Femme. That one woman that everyone wanted to take home; that everyone wanted on his arms to show off to friends; the woman so uninhibited, that pain and fear knew no names with her… 

And I would sit with my cigarette holder and my bejeweled, make-up bag and my admirers around me, each offering everything from a wonderful night-out to love and babies, or from the really bold, a night of long, powerful passion. And I said no and yes, like a Goddess.. Because, really, I was Aphrodite herself.. Who would dare displease the most beautiful woman in all of Paris? I was the goddess of love and beauty and of the arts and of writing.. Oh, I remember the stories I would write. Petite, lovely ones about dancing girls and strong-jawed Marquises, and money and diamonds and travel..   But how much of my own celebrated writing did I ever understand?  How much of my pen wrote to me?  

It feels strange to grow old.. because, really, no matter how much you tell yourself it’s coming somehow you expect to be pardoned…to be excused from the exercise. And, you know, most of the time one doesn't really notice that one is growing old, just that one is tired more often or that one has flabbier skin but then one day, you look into the looking-glass and you don’t know anything anymore…and then the real fun starts- the self-doubt, the oppressive loneliness. The cold bitter winter of one’s life has begun and one has just realized that one’s forgotten the wintercoat and gloves… 

I shouldn't have come back.. age and wisdom of youth speak from these rooms and I have gone too long to react well to both. I am a tired, old woman with too many memories and I am awaiting… 

[noyonayana]

A glance into a forgotten abyss

A girl is looking into a cluttered room filled with paraphernalia from ages gone by… and I watch as a man enters and instantly, the room is his. It is his rocking chair that he is walking toward, his faithful hound that is trailing in after him to curl up on his feet and his red fire that is warming the company tonight. 

And beside his rocking chair, is the thing that attracted the girl in the first place. Dark mahogany-fashioned shelves that housed books. Tens of thousands of books in every human language ever written in and then some. Books on botany and historiography and the science of divining the future and the art of understanding the present. Tattered books that needed to be handled carefully lest their contents be lost forever, taken by that fiend- time and decay and books that had just been bought yesterday, that needed only to be opened for them to sing of the heroic stories they contained. 

The girl watches with a now jealous gleam to her dark eyes and the man, gets up slowly and walks toward the bookshelf. He picks up a small, red book, walks back to his arm-chair, sits down, puts on his glasses, strokes his old dog and thus settles in for a quiet evening with a glass of old scotch handy. And the girl is jealous. “Because I cannot do that. I have lives to take, and babies to steal in the dark of the night and I cannot have that. Those simple creature comforts” she thinks.. She cannot sit down on that arm-chair, stroke that lovely dog and read that book, that talks of such alien things.. love? lust ? life?  “What do I know of life”, she asks herself. “I only understand the language of pain.. of loss.. and why not, of death..,”  

I don’t know for how long I stood outside the room, looking in through that infernal glass being unable to actually touch my paradise, when I glanced upon my own reflection in the glass... “Why, my skin- my beautiful, bright skin, she sags like an old woman’s and my dark eyes- where is the passion in them?. My straight back- which old lover took you away from me, leaving me with this bent and sunken body that is youthful no more?”  and then she murmurs-”Have I always been like this?” 

And then with a sigh that seemed to be echoed by the windy trees, she sneaks into the room. The man, by now has fallen asleep, with a look of such content upon his face that for the first time, in all her existence, she hates herself for what she has come to do. For the first time, she questions her meaning , her existence, her answers that she had accepted so easily before.. And being left with no choice, I quickly bend down and bestow a small kiss upon his old face and with a soft tremble, I watch as he exists no more. 

I am she and she is I and I have never hated myself so much, with a passion that is so useless before. 

[noyonayana]

Maybe I could learn a lot about letting go if I took notes when the clouds release storms and hold nothing back.

heroffbeatinfinity (via wnq-writers)

Hear, hear.

[noyonayana]

The Living

"To come back from the dead is the noblest desire is mankind. But to actually do so, one must truly die. " As if that isn’t a noble and yet cowardly thing to do - dying. ” What were we thinking when we stopped dreaming, when we stopped living? That it wasn’t worth anything?” Of course nothing means anything; And as convoluted as that sentence is- it makes sense. Though not as much sense as music does, which is admittedly not too much. And as sorrowful and pathetic as we are, doomed to live out the entirety of our existence on this miserably efficient planet, do we not at least deserve to know why? Are we to never understand at least why silence has to be the only answer? I see mouths moving and legs walking. I see laughs ripping out and make up lathered on spotty, distressed faces but I cannot SEE them… not really. I can see meat and flesh and bones and they I suppose, could in some alternate world symbolize desires and dreams- which means we are only as transparent as our mutilated, unhappy physical corpses… and isn’t that a happy thought? But I suppose, the bigger question here, that demands to be asked is- why not? Why not pink, flying elephants? Why not Mordor and the Misty Mountains? Why not have green, antlered puss- filled alien faces? Why not, in a sense, mean and signify nothing. We have been given a gift and we are to never look the horse in the mouth…. too closely. After all, the Universe doesn’t owe us anything… I don’t understand… I don’t care… I don’t want… I don’t… Laisse-moi être.

[noyonayana]

This.

[noyonayana]

Why must I be only one person

I’m driving now and this road extends over mountains and rivers.  I’m going over brooks and little shanties and small villages that house small dreams. I don’t know where I’m going. I suppose once the road ends I’ll have to stop. But I don’t want to. I don’t want to not feel the wind over my face and make airwaves with my hand. I don’t want to take off my sun glasses. I don’t want to look back and not see a different hilltop or river glinting in the sun at me. 

I stop now for a moment to stretch my legs and find the place I have stopped at, like a lot of things I’ve seen in this trip inordinately beautiful. There are big, shady trees all around and a small dusty road winding around this fôret that I’m in. I walk a little further on and find a small, dusty man selling fresh looking cut fruits by the side of the road. I stop and ask him for some cut pineapples. And as the delicious, sweet taste of the yellow pineapples fills my mouth, the man in the tradition of all inquisitive, old men asks me what I’m doing. And I tell him and when I finish, with a look of pride in his face, the dusty fruit-seller tells me he has a son who is studying in a small engineering school nearby. He tells me that his son wants to be an engineer and live in the big city. He tells me that he is looking to find his son a nice, educated wife so he won’t be lonely in the big city. And when I asked him why he wouldn’t go to the ‘big city’ if he could, he says that he is happy enough selling cut fruits to lost, world-weary travellers like myself.  

I wonder, sometimes now, if I will ever feel that sense of purpose and direction that that man felt doing his little bit. I get back into my own car and I drive away forever.

It’s the little people and the little things that affect us in the most cardinal ways ever. But I suppose, that’s the price we pay, for just being human.  

[noyonayana]

Predictable irritability with composite nuances

I wonder why, quite often the people that I wish would leave me alone, don't. And the ones I wish I could breathe in and imprint upon my very soul are the runners. 

I dream often that I want and need to run. that I've donned my running shoes and have warmed up, and just as I've set a nice pace, and am cruising along, I'm stopped... almost permanently; by animals, by cars, by horse-drawn carriages carrying newly-weds and by hearses carrying dead couples. I know what it means; that I want to do well... but life will slow me down, stop me even. I will have to let loves and deaths, even engine-fuelled motor cars drive by me in my quest to find the people that matter to me.  

And yet, in a very juvenile manner, I'm afraid of giving meaning to something as fleeting and senseless as a human life. Why should my happiness depend upon their own collected and scattered cells of loves and fears and lusts?  Why should I?   Is it because in doing so, I am conforming to an idea and a concept that is as old as time itself- sharing?  loving, even?  Or is it because in doing so, I shall be a traitor, a liar, not to the universe which is too vast and too thoughtless to pay attention to me but to the one person that does matter- myself. I, that have always espoused living, not just existing or staying alive..

I have recently through a series of drunken revelations and sordid discoveries found out some truths about myself. and I don't like them. It seems it is not just my life, my existence that makes no sense.. but, as if it wasn't already a given, I myself don't make sense. I want to be alone, yet I am afraid of loneliness. I want to make sense and matter, yet I am afraid of mattering too much (if such a thing could exist). I want to love and feel human, yet I despise humanity and all it has come to stand for.

I think in a very pathetic and lonely sort of way, I have started to despise myself.

[noyonayana]

This is what jobs are quit for.

I have a dream and while it does not necessarily involve a glittering Hollywood movie after I've died, with a star cast that looks better than I ever will, I have a dream. And that dream is one day, I will find the black turtle of spasmodic awesomeness. and after, I find that black turtle, which I will un-originally call Blacky, or Dopey, I shall retire to the bavarian black forests, or the amazonian rainforests and I shall be a hermit and eat and drink the ambrosia of the gods, because I will have discovered the meaning to life. Or atleast my meaning, to my life. There must be a black turtle for everyone, so that all can discover the ancient truths of which the Buddhist and Indian monks and hermits spent aeons searching, and thought they had found. 

The black turtle of infinite goodness told me nothing.. or to give it it's due credit, I did not understand anything that it said.. and I think it very sad that this was to be.. to search and search and spend years doing so, on the quest for someone or something that one is convinced will one day make sense, but only to find out that it doesn't make any more sense that if you couldn't find what you were looking for.   It's like waiting and waiting to fall in love and thinking that the world will start to make sense but then you wake up one day, and you've turned into a giant lizard and the woman you're in love with doesn't even notice that.. or the fact the she is a lizard herself.       My god, what if we are all lizards. and only some of us know, and they are the 'mad' ones.. 

[noyonayana]

What to do when you need to override your instincts

I don't suppose anyone understands.. But that's what I'm supposed to suppose. I'm an angsty guilt-ridden sexually-frustrated, parent-hating teenager, so that's the only politically correct way I'm supposed to deal with hardship, so... 

I'm a bit confused (as can be easily supposed). I'll start over. 

I look at pieces of the moon on my window-sill and wonder why the night must be so hauntingly beautiful sometimes and a terrifying ordeal other times. I wonder if people would know it was night if the moon wasn't there.. on a metaphysical level, that is. I wonder what the land of the midnight sun, is like where it is sunny 3-4 months of the year, and plunged in darkness the rest of the time. I want to assert my dominance on the physically challenging areas of human superiority and lie down to a peaceful death for the mental complications. I wish there was a way to remove the influence of society on man, while still making man.. social. Is there a way, I wonder, to make a man look at a beautiful piece of art and not think immediately,of something utterly and impossibly intelligent and witty or stupid and inane, but to just look at it, and wonder why man needs, unlike any other being on this planet, to look at something, beautiful a person, a piece of rock, dust motes in the wind, and think my god, that is so beautiful, I must capture it, and make it mine. And, so take it home, or take a photo of it, or draw it, or sculpt it, or byheart it or... 

Maybe, the truly beauteous things in the world, are the ones that you cannot see unless your eyes are covered with the rose-coloured spectacles of love. Is that why, some people can go through life living in matrimonial bliss with just one person, and not feel empty? Because, love makes every new and drearily same day an adventure. 

I'd rather not see the world through rose-coloured glasses. I know, that there are things more lovely in the world, than one person, one life, and one room, and I intend to find them, see them, love them for a minute, and let them go. Because, that is the best thing that can be done to something you love. Set it free. Or just let it study in your college,whichever suits your fancy. 

[noyonayana]

The word-flower

One sun-shiny and bright day, I was given a word-flower. And I don’t think I have ever liked an inanimate, symbolic thing more than I did that petite flower. And it really was petite, but it was sent to me as a reminder that it doesn’t really matter the size of a gift, if the feelings behind sending it are pure. And they were pure.. they were kind and sweet and smelled of old sweaters on rainy days and hugs that go on; of black and white movies watched over and over again, because really, one can never have enough of Ingrid Bergman; they reminded me of being young and carefree and not worried about my next bill; they reminded me of summers that lasted forever and beach houses and winters that were spent under warm quilts, with our bodies pressed together, as we lay huddled in my bed, not talking, but being there, because we’ve forgotten the pleasure of silences shared.. 

It didn’t say who it was from, but I don’t need a sender’s address to recognize the handwriting, to maybe even recognize the smell( was that in my head?) that clung to the flower.  I know I have no control of my destiny, but I think I have some control over who gets to break my virgin heart.. and I’m still glad it’s you that did it.

I don’t want to understand, but I do.. and I am a better human being for that.. I know that destinies cannot be forged if we lie in wait for moments to come to us..But I think I am that much closer to being a comet because of this word-flower. 

[noyonayana]

Unfeeling crescendos.

I could at the same time, hear and not hear the thump, thump, thump of the music beat and I let it wash over me.. I could see people I liked and people I didn't like all become one and nothing mattered anymore. I think the DJ was playing good music.. but I don't know, and it didn't matter.. Because, I was swaying and jumping and running and yelling to my own music. I could feel very clearly the thumping of my heart, and I remember I was very happy to think that everybody else could too, because we were drunk on it.. We were drunk on the fact that we were young and careless, and could afford to make mistakes.. because, really, how did it matter? Nothing, except for that we were all there in that crowded gazebo listening to mad music and dancing to our own tunes... and responsibilities, deaths, unhappiness.. knew no names there..  Because what does it matter that death is waiting for us, just around the corner? What does it matter, that we may never hold new life in our hands and marvel at the simplicity and yet traditionality of such a gesture.

 It mattered not to a group of young adults who gathered at a small watering hole and shot each other up with insomniac dreams and wild pleasures. You know the phrase- dance all night? We did more than just that.. We loved all night.. We loved the stars for twinkling and looking like intoxicated gods high up in their heaven, drinking ambrosia and looking down in approval at us. We loved our hearts for deciding to beat the rhythm, so we could hear the same beat and lose our minds to the unity of it.. We loved each other just because we could. We looked up 'amour' in our hearts and found we had more entries there than Google ever will. 

I awake disoriented, and everything I feel now is confusing. I don't feel the vibes anymore and I feel strangely lost because of that. I.. need to do that again. 

[noyonayana]

here goes the sun...

My sister and I live in the outskirts of a little town in between here and there. It is a very pretty village, during winter, because, since we are from a cold country, it is white and jolly with snow everywhere and people from nearby towns visiting.. My little brother Johann and I manage a little cafe a few ways away from the main street, during winter, because that is when my grandmama's hot cocoa recipe is better than gold. During summer, Johann goes to work at a metal smith's and I do as many odd jobs as I can do to float us. 

But not this past week. This past week I have been taking just as many jobs as I absolutely have to, so I can spend all my free time, sitting by the lake.. The lake is a small one, with little rocks and gullies coming out from hidden corners.. and I play my father's old violin.. and try to commit to memory, what the sun feels like. because, we get only about 2-3 months of active sunlight, before the sun runs to the south.. and there is nothing, not even my beloved violin I love more than the feel of the gentle afternoon sun on my back as I lie down on the shore and think about my castle of dreams and my sea of wishes. The sun is fading now..and I know that it will not come back for it seems like forever because, I honestly, now, don't know how I deal without the warmth and contentment it offers me. 

I hate prolonged goodbyes.. because, I know that the longer I stay in wait, of some miracle that will stop the sun and I from parting ways, the more despondent I will feel when I cannot feel the sun's warmth on me anymore.. The winter with its snow, and its games and its extra money.. is great.. But summer, with its slow business and exhaustion is wonderful.