Priorities shift, they say and how is it that now a big part of me feels finally that some part of the saying is more than a mere expression of regret, a badly-disguised feeling of guilt and regret, I cannot say for sure. When some suggested that frequent meetings are held much too often that there is such apparent nullity in the things said, I can only disagree. The truth is, we have been meeting so infrequently that every attempt at conversation meets only a smile that signifies failure.

One may acknowledge that failure. That is difficult but simple enough to be understood. What is most difficult to comprehend is how some things that used to be so effortless has now turned so deliberate, so strained and so unnatural and the agony comes from the combination of conscious recognition and feeble attempts to ammend the matter. The sad truth that many of us try hard to evade is you cannot mend what's broken if it's too late.

To look back on the times you have had is an act of futility. There are moments that slip away while you try to recognise them in their form, vanish when you have decided to find ways to keep them - photographs, videos, letters, seasonal greeting cards.

What is lost may not be retrieved but watching every attempt fail in its new glorified height tells you the only thing you have to hold on to could possibly be only the past. There are people you try to keep but the keeping, in it self, is so tedious a task and every attempt you make brings only the same, boring result. Distance is an excuse. Time, an even better excuse. Priorities shifting - the same disguise you allow yourself to put on when it neccessitates you to, the same one you wouldn't have approved of when someone else uses it.

Excuses are for the cowardly because you make them when you cannot bring yourself to tell the truth, because you cannot stand the look on the faces who have just heard them, because you know the truth slits you apart more than it does them. Excuses are for pansies. You make them and you make a feeble attempt to justify them.

It is a new year and new years always make the keeping so much harder. The metaphor of slowly drifting apart is not just a metaphor; it is a poor understatement of a realistic and severe experience. In reality, it is not simply a slow occassioning of events neither is the action merely of drifting. It happens in dramatic speed with dramatic fashion. And even if the metaphor of 'slowly drifting apart' is apt, then my ignorance of the occasioning of the drifting makes the experience no less dramatic. The fault, is, as usual, mine. Mine to take. Mine to disregard.

And, because it is a new year and because on new years people make resolutions, I can make one I can only hope to keep - not to make excuses.

[[ music ]] Chopin- Etude Op. 10, No. 12 in C Minor (Revolutionary Etude)
[[ book ]] Orhan Pamuk - My Name Is Red
[[ mood ]] tired

1 comments

We learn in Criminal Law that very crime needs the mental element of intention. We call it mens rea. But, there are crimes you commit without intention. That is why insanity is a plea, recklessness is a plea and so is mistake. How often is it that one should note one own's mental state in the commission of an act of crime?

Is a crime commited without intention any less culpable than one committed with?

Simply, not a question for me.

[[ mood ]] tired

2 comments

It is easy to shrug off responsiblity.

You may have courted Death and later say you have lived and died more than once in a lifetime but it takes more than staring Death in the eyes to know what it means to die. Or rather what it means to live. Or rather what it means for some other to live while watching it happen. Always, it has seemed so easy to walk away and so easy to say it doesn't matter and shall not matter. Always, it has been harder to be the one watching than the one doing the walking away. Always.

Could I say I have lived? Could I write like I have lived?

And, have you, when you're on the streets filled with the sort of faces you never intended to remember, walking and walking, always getting to where you want to go, you no longer know why you've set off to begin with? I wish I could say I have lived. And, I wish more so to say I have died to live again, to know life as it was meant to be known, to look at life in a way I have never looked at, to live a life again like I should have but have always failed to. I wish I could say I have lived.

But, the truth is, I have not lived. And, I have not died. I wish I had. It gives the present more sense than the way I have always looked at it. Again, I havent. There is a general incapacity to feel. That was something very few souls hesitated to tell me. And, the incapacity to feel has always, always meant to me the inablity to live. For, what beauty is there to life if it is filled only with monotomy, with routines, with familiarity?

Life gives you exquisite joy and exquisite sorrow. But, I have felt none. None of the exquisite joy or sorrow; none of the extreme anger or gratefulness. None of which I could record in memory, build upon, recognise and lived with as an achievement - as evidence of my life and death. I wish I could feel - not on the surface, touching and scratching like a miserable cat but in depths I have never allowed myself to in ways I have warned myself against.

How could one not feel? And, how could one feel so very little?

And so, you stare sometimes into blankness asking questions no one could answer, questions no one was meant to answer, questions you take great pain to put out of your mind. Then, you say to yourself how hollow and how meaningless all those questions are. Afterall, if there is no intention whatsoever to answer them, why ask? Questions. Questions. Questions.

How so very tiringly tedious.

[[ book ]] Virginia Woolf - Mrs Dalloway
[[ mood ]] uncomfortable

2 comments

LIVERPOOL 2 - CHELSEA 0
Anfield, 20 January 2007

I'm a Liverpool fan. Sue me.

[[ music ]] You'll Never Walk Alone
[[ mood ]] gloat-y

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"L'amour est un oiseau rebelle
Que nul ne peut apprivoiser,
Et c'est bien en vain qu'on l'appelle,
S'il lui convient de refuser. "
Carmen's Habanera



A lot of people make it sound like it's something random, something candid - something that happens in a passing moment. Happens to a lot of people too. Or, so they say. But, ubiquity is not quite the equal of popularity. Although, I cannot say for sure it is the same for this. So, it's a motion of falling. Only, you're not pushed into it; you're simply just too blind to see that you're falling.

It puzzles me, then, how something so random and so unusually candid intrudes upon one's consciousness with so effortless a manner, so constant a rate. It's a simple motion of falling. People do it all the time it seems - or at the very least that's what I have been told.

All of a sudden, the world becomes a better place, tinted with roses and all that. How? It could be hormonal. But, that in itself, is a failed attempt of explanation. How strange ... how very strange ...

And, here I am, wondering ... all over again, how that stare melted me into such helpless a position.


How careless of me ...

[[ music ]] Highlights from Bizet's Carmen
[[ book ]] Colm Toibin - The Master
[[ mood ]] weird

1 comments