Life's Elsewhere

Two kinds of Letters: written, unwritten…

In Living like a Log on September 12, 2007 at 4:07 am

This is not a kind of post I generally write for this blog (I do it elsewhere), a post which talks about the person who is writing it. I have always talked through my posts and ears which knew that it is meant for her read the post with her eyes. But this is also the emblematic post of this blog, shorn of all those fictional trappings this post lays the blog bare. Its not fictional spectrum prisming the non-fictional, its neither any mischievous fiction posing itself as the non-fiction. Its my voice speaking to you, because I have lost the space from where I could have written to you, this is a post which stops pretending…

I am beginning to write a post which, at its worst, risks being the most pretentious one in the entire blog, because it talks about the person who is writing it, not Love’s Ragpicker, but Life’s Elsewhere; at its most honest, it might be the most incorrect post ever written in this blog, because it tries to understand me.

My blogs are unabashedly about love, engendered by love, addressed to her, though I will never, ever identify/describe/portray her. She knows who she is, if she thinks that she is not she…my hard luck! She…might write a letter to me. No, I am not trying to appropriate her voice, I can’t write like her, I can never lip her words…I am trying to speak to me from the space she sees me, from somewhere I can never view myself

She, gone in the dawn

Dear Prince of the Danes,

When tragedy repeats, it is rendered farcical.

I refuse to be your words. I refuse to be the parchment on which you will write your figments. I refuse to be your stylo. I refuse my blood and my tears to be your ink. I refuse to be the alphabets which you choose to be bold or slender. I refuse to be the sentences you shape, the rhythms you curve, the rhymes you lock. I refuse to provide you the pleasures of twisting me, turning me, pulling me inside-out anymore; everything you did to me, all your gushing out prolific, all your cold withdrawals into silence, all your publishing and immediately deleting, all your dressing me up in templates of angelic womanhood and your succeeding unease…I refuse to be what you wrote in me as me. I was born through your words, I refuse to remain in your ideas.

Because I loved you and seldom said it to you the way I mean it, though you knew and you never felt it. Because I have felt and heard that you love me too, ’cause you always said it. How often a man says that he loves; how often did you taste the words you said? Why did you say it in so many ways, hastily discarding one way of saying it to pick up another, like grabbing the shapes of Nokia cellphones through which you wish to connect? How often did you hold those words in your tongue, deferring to let it go, so that those words of love melt in your mouth like exquisite caramel? Those simple words like “I love you”? You were always spitting those words out dear, mesmerized with the sounds you produce…so esoteric, so tongue-in-cheek, chick-in-tongue, so you, and in spite of what you blabber…so male!

You loved. You loved tempestuous, showering me with things unheard, those words were like things touching me and me discovering the places where it touched, those little things like little men swarming all over me. Discovering; I never knew I was there, I never knew I am here. You were a voice – to others you might be a vision – you were sounds to me and I knew that even sounds can touch! I shivered when a little sound touched me, I expressed my sounds too which didn’t mean things but which told you that I am happy. I felt like a woman.

Ummm…a paragraph of tickle there? Are you tickled red boy? Then let me qualify; it was me feeling myself, me discovering myself, me falling in love with the woman in the mirror. Don’t sulk boy, I never meant you were nothing. I am only saying that you never knew your own value, you never discovered yourself, you never felt yourself, you never knew how feelings touched, because you never felt me the way I felt you…so busy you were being what you already were! Love was not a beginning to you child, you were continuing what you already were…you never thought that love will bloom a new you, so busy you were performing what you defined yourself to be. That was so male! Being finalized and fixed and fastened to your yesterdays…do you know how the self flows inside into a delirious flux?

Did you love me my poet? Or did you love an idea of a woman? Did I exist to you or was I just a canvas to dump the jaded and faded colors of yesteryears? Then why did you start the carnival of unrest one day? Your bites, your fangs, your acid tongue, your metal claws, your raves, your rants and all your screams that I am not loving you well! You thought that all those spectacle of passions, all those display of sentiments would make me blush…later, I mean, when I would be recollecting my emotions in tranquility, ‘coz then you are driving me mad to tears which I was obstinately holding back…would make me blush that the crazy boy, how he loves me! You thought you were making me feel wanted, feel special, but did you see, on the first place – bluntly, blatantly – that you were hurting me? That I was bleeding? Didn’t you know that a woman of flesh bleeds and only a woman of air will swoon to the sky? It was like shaking someone, who is stuttering and stammering more, to speak it out. And I never, like you, liked to spit it out.

And then you were gone. Silent and mute, smelling of sulk. And then you return, showering with love again, making me feel high and happy. And then you drive the knife and then you say the world’s longest sorry. You start crying (and hell I did melt, couldn’t rub your tears dry, ‘coz you are just a voice, not a skin or a cheek) and when I started telling my things you, as always, had your reasons and excuses, explanations and clarifications ready…your words, words, words…motherfucking words! ready and kicking! With such veracity that I was immediately disgusted of words. Words tasted stale and smelled so foul that I preferred being dumb. But it pissed me off when finally those words screeched in my ears…your signing off “love you honey”. So pathetically Hollywoodish male! What did you expect? “I love you too”? So predictable! Not the reply, but when the next day you complained: why I am not saying those words…

I am certifying you, baby, you are precious and pathetic and sick. You drove me crazy in the literal sense of the phrase, not in the connotative sense of one of your giggling fans. So engrossed in your…penile words…you never had the breath or the time to know that I had my feelings too, I too shed human fluids, like blood and tears. So I am going away with our love-child, our little girl born out of this love, i.e. me. Now, I need to save a little bit of love for me…

I know you will find someone else more quickly than you think you can, so please don’t rubbish emotive human language again, my boy. I know it, because you always need a shoulder to rant upon, an eye-candy to gently ogle at, husky moaning music to your ears…a wall which will echo back your voice telling the tales of your woes, a present to justify your past and fortify your future, a present without its unique value of a togetherness…a girl who will bear all your masochistic spectacles and whimper in fear because you are maintaining that she is the cause of your pitiable sufferings. A poor little girl who will suddenly find herself on the stage, in an unrehearsed play but is not provided the lines! The lass is doomed, ’cause I know she will play me, ’cause thats what you do, conjure a present where you finish off the yesterday the way you wished to play it out but blew it up!

I am not deserting you my lad, I am just avoiding further headaches. And if you want the taste of those words the way they bittered me when you overlooked my bleeding tears, here they are: “I love you honey”.

Kisses to you.

Yours Sonai

*** *** ***

Readers, are you waiting for the second letter? Well, she predicted it so well. Does it need to be written?

  1. [...] Just to… …lead you to my self-portrait. [...]

  2. Till you break the shackles of bitterness….you are not free…….but i sincerely hope you get your freedom…someday…

  3. @previous comment…Cant there be freedom within the cage??? The shackles are so well entangled to our bodies its hard to break em..cant we create that space within the comfort of bitter pain??? Its familiarity?? Dunno…was thinking…loves ragpicker will answer it sometimes…maybe…

  4. To Tani and Darkling,
    Don’t know how to respond…this is one of the most painful posts I have written, then decided that inflicting pain to my own self is not painful at all. I tried to look at myself from another vantage point, I will be never confirmed if I had been appropriate…am not waiting for it. I know there is a glimpse of truth in this auto-portrait.
    Freedom is desired now…but what is that freedom?
    A simple confirmation from someone that I had been true to myself in this unique post and that it doesn’t matter that I had been like this…
    Freedom is not a negation of what has already been etched so permanently in memory. Not a denial, not a withdrawal of a possible letter like the above.
    Freedom is an extension of the boundaries beyond the cage…(increasing the cage space might be?)…that I am something more beyond this too…freedom is getting more breathing space.

  5. You know, I actually prefer personal posts like this…I must say the letter is well written, however biting it may be. It reminds me of how emotionally stunted humans can be. Certainly there is truth in the idea that we must be strong in ourselves without the need to be with someone, however, there’s a two-sided trick to this equation. Only when you are sure of yourself can you succeed in a relationship. I think that many people in modern culture have an erroneous idea that romance is some perfect Hollywood thing, yet in reality it is so much different. The most perfect person will be in a bad mood sometimes, yell when they don’t mean it, lie, be dependent on you for reassurance. That is what being in a relationship means and if you are a strong person you will be able to handle it. The only line I think should be drawn is when the person is abusive. I agree that freedom exists in that ‘cage’ and that the idea that a relationship is a cage is not a good idea. I would say society is the cage in which we’re all forced into moulds that aren’t necessarily ourselves.

  6. hi!

    i would love you to list your blog in my blog! so that my readers can learn about it! just submit your blog url and blog description.
    http://shongjog.wordpress.com/2007/07/31/submit-your-own-blogs/

    btw, i wrote about my dilemma concerning writing artist statements. Although you are not an artist, you are a writer and i would love to know your thoughts.
    http://shogoto.wordpress.com/2007/09/15/questions-about-ethics-and-sociology-hmmmm/

  7. Reading these lines I can only remember L.Cohen’s song:

    “Like a baby still-born
    Like a beast with its horn
    I have torn
    Everyone
    Who reached out for me”

    Maybe I have misread your post. or maybe not.

    anyways do check this wen u have tym http://inam-poetry.blogspot.com/2007/09/lines-for-leonard.html

  8. No Inam, why will it be a misreading? It’s just a valid reading…and may I point out something? In previous comments — not in the post — me and Loubird were talking of cages…

    Can ‘like a bird in the wire’ be further away? :)

  9. couldn’t really read through all of this. too much painful intensity.
    can only hope that you were wrong, for your own sake. and hope that i never have to go through this. being torn apart once, twice, thrice is enough for now.

    Life’s Elsewhere:
    Thanks, it was touching. No, it wasn’t entirely right. I have this masochistic streak which is again wrecking havoc in recent posts. And have made it a habit of being torn apart and still desired! Strange that is… :)

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