Foolishness
I know it has been months ago, and a lot of things have happened that should have buried that memory in my mind already, but it stands out like a neon color among a hundred of other monochromatic events in my life. This thought is getting old, but I won’t let go of it for just a little longer. Maybe I’m just putting meaning into nothing. Maybe this is just a figment of my own devices. Maybe I’m just hanging on to a timeline that will never happen in this universe.
I don’t know. I really don’t. But I’ll keep on believing and holding on to it, until I don’t have to anymore… because it finally happened in real life, on a version of this fantastic freaking universe where we actually both exist.
I have this gut feeling it will.
Coffee & Cigarettes
Light rain pours out from the gray sky. The soft, lingering sound of raindrops hitting the rooftop blends well with Steven Patrick Morrissey’s iconic voice resonating through the white-walled bedroom. They make a semblance of a melodramatic symphony, something one could hear straight out of a soap opera.
Her shaved legs rub against the silk texture of the sheets. Sprawling in her mattress, she lies like a retired, fat cat. She puffs a cigarette in between her slow breathing pattern, and stares blankly at the ceiling as the smoke dissolves in the atmosphere. A tint of a smudged mascarra creates dark circles around her bloodshut eyes. She inhales the smell of a coffee stain on her pillow.
While the sun timidly creeps out of its tiny corner in the horizon, she is wide awake.
There, in her tiny, little wasteland, alone with her coffee and cigarettes, she drowns herself in a bottomless pool of bewildering contemplations. She lives like a hermit in her own head, like a wearisome Sofia Coppola movie where she feels most at ease in the silent moments.
She opens her laptop, and stares at a white blank page in front of her. The emptiness of it has been haunting her in her sleep. She feels the dust off the keyboard, and hits a few letters.
“Bloody hell, my life is so boring I have nothing to blog about. FML. “
She closes the computer, and takes a puff from her cigarette.
Esmee,
Esmee wipes the fog off her vanity mirror.
The marble sink is covered with her personal things – contact lense case, dental floss, a bottle of perfume, and lipsticks of different shades of red. Little glass bottles of shampoo and mouthwash sit in the corner of the sink. She has never used any of those neatly-packaged “compliments from the hotel”. Not even the bedroom slippers, or the robe. These made her feel like a guest in her four-cornered, 100 square meter room of plush carpeting, silk curtains and Italian-woven bed sheets.
That feeling she certainly eluded.
Esmee takes out the blow dryer from the top drawer below the sink. She starts drying her hair. The bathroom smells like freshly – peeled pomegranates. She has never tasted one, yet she is convinced they smelled like that – like a fine, Sunday morning in August, when pomegranates are usually ripe for harvest. She’s thinking of somewhere like California. Yes, an orchard of pomegranate trees in California. She, with her straw hat and bicycle, pedaling through the path walk lined by rows of swaying pomegranate trees.
Her hair serum is flavored pomegranate and vanilla, and every day the bathroom is engulfed with the familiar whiff. Her auburn-colored hair is still dripping wet. She had it dyed in a local salon in the outskirts of Vienna 3 months ago. It is symbolic for her, her fiery red mane. It makes her feel alive and free and empowered. Every time she sees her reflection, a doppelganger stares back at her. She’s not that yuppie Esmee anymore, working an eight to five job on the twenty-sixth floor of a public relations firm. She’s now Esmee, just Esmee, without the job title and the three – piece suit.
She is herself.
—
I wrote this prelude of a supposed-to-be short story during a time in my life where I wanted to run away. Just run away from it all. Most probably in a foreign land where I’m just another being in a sea of faces. It was a phase of identity-searching and a lot of questioning. Adolescence. I know right.
I never got to finish the story of Esmee (notice the comma in the title), and I think it’s good I leave it that way.
Maybe someday I’ll get my hands on it again and finally figure out what Esmee is doing, drying her hair in an Italian hotel at 3 in the morning.
Will she ever go home?
February Monsoon
That Wednesday morning started to rain like cats and dogs.
I saw her standing in the waiting shed. She must have been there for a good 20 minutes already. I figured she didn’t have an umbrella.
She must have left it intentionally. She didn’t welcome its extra baggage along her dozens of Biology books jam-packed in her backpack. I know how heavy it could it get. I’ve carried it several times, most often when her asthma attacked and I needed to walk her home.
She looked particularly irked that early morning. Well, she has always been never a morning person. She avoided 7 AM classes at all cost. Perhaps she wasn’t too lucky to do so this semester
I assumed she was late for class. She hated that. She never bought that 15-minute grace period mentality.
I held my orange and white umbrella, a convenient giveaway from a recent college job fair. I supposed it could suffice to protect us both from what seemed to be villains from the sky. That morning was a free cut, so I figured, why not.
I came up to her. She looked so surprised to see me. I offered to walk her to her class, and she agreed with a hint of hesitation. I opened up my umbrella, and we fit perfectly right under its shade.
She wore perfume, I thought to myself.
I wanted to walk slowly to protect, what I noticed, her suede lady shoes (that’s what people from those department stores would call them) from the wet patches of rainwater on the road. But she was in a hurry, so I caught up with her pace.
I attempted to do small talk.
“What’s your class?” I started.
“Creative writing.”
“Wha.. Wow. Creative writing?”
“Yeah.”
“What happened to Biology?”
“I shifted out.”
Dumbfounded.
“Since when?”
“Um, since three years ago?”
“But you’ve always wanted to become a doctor. Find a cure for asthma, go to a medical mission, Mother Teresa style, the works.”
She stopped walking and faced me.
“You know, sometimes childhood dreams just don’t materialize too well in college. When plans fail, moving on seems the only option.”
Of course I knew what she was talking about. But I kept mum.
We took a few strides when she quipped,
“Well at least now, I can write about my broken dreams as a supposed to be doctor-turned-writer. You know what they say..”
“When life gives you lemons, find a new life,” we both said in unison.
She giggled.
Oh, how I remembered that familiar laugh.
The Stare
There is something about a stare.
One can see so much for only a split second that two pairs of eyes meet.
For that someone who penned the saying that the eye is the window to the soul surely had understood the many emotions that come from a stare.
These emotions, however, evoke confusion, for the feeling one gets from a stare can be of many things – truth, illusion, sincerity, or deception.
One doesn’t have the luxury of an explanation for it, for a stare is usually something that is ephemeral and short of words, probably from a passerby, a stranger, or that particular person you only know from afar, someone who doesn’t know your name.
A stare leaves much to the imagination.
And that’s exactly my sentiment, as I look at her from the corner of my eye.
It all started when our eyes accidentally - or purposely, I’m not sure – crossed as we walked past each other on that fateful day. She was with her friend, and I was with myself. It was innocent and meaningless. We looked away like nothing happened.
But the romantic in me dared to do what those actors did in soap operas. I would look at her from afar like a distant observant, and she would catch me off guard, staring. I would look away embarrassed, yet I would see her staring back from my peripheral view and giggled to herself.
Since then, we’ve played the staring game like kids, with each stare growing more like a gaze – intimate and intent, yet seemingly ambiguous of its meaning.
Now as I look at her, I’m wondering if all has been just a figment of my hopeless romantic mind, that to her, every stare and gaze is nothing more but curiosity from a stranger like me.
I have no idea if she reciprocates the same emotions I have.
She starts walking, taking little strides side by side her friend.
The longer this staring game gets, I thought to myself, the more it becomes apparent that this isn’t real until I take it beyond what it is right now.
I muster the courage to do so, and walk towards her.
On a given day, we’d just exchange gazes as we walk past each other.
But this time, I’m going to look her straight in the eye, ask her name and talk to her. I’m going to make this real. I’m going to do it.
A few feet separate us.
My hands begin to sweat, and my heart is pounding in my chest.
“Hi! Um, I’m John, and well, I just wanted to introduce myself and you know, finally talk to you in person.”
“Uh, hi?” She answers unsurely but with a smile. “I’m Jesse. Nice meeting you, I guess.”
She looks to me, but not at me. She looks at a blank space, her dark brown eyes staring at no one in particular, but to an open, endless space of nothingness.
Then it hit me.
Everything seemed real now.
