F R E I

{Vibe}

What kind of a consciousness is it that knows itself to exist but doesn’t know why? In what way does that make sense? In what way does it not?

The quest.

The longing to learn.

The yearning for answers.

The learning to yield. If only my brain were better at retaining information. What is ‘information’? And when it is not ‘information’, what is it then, that we get, if we get it, at all? What, if anything, can be known, can be felt, can be appreciated, understood, can be experienced or imagined, or both? And is there, but is there a difference?

Remembrance of things past and future. The energy stream, and the particles. Obviously, the waves. The idiosyncrasies. Material flaws. Cracks that let the light shine through. Nonuniform irregularities.

Quantum behaviour…

8 The Leopard (and His Spots)

We’re into weird territory now, and I’m a little excited. My hold on reality – loose so as not to say non-existent since early this morning – has just undergone one more lateral nudge. Whatever I’m clasping at now is clearly not what I’m used to. I can’t blame the Bloody Mary: it may have been perfect, but it was not nearly so strong as to give me hallucinations. Do Bloody Marys ever? Is seeing yourself as a youthful rendering in your current day environment a hallucination? Then again, is a somewhat trendy garden bar cafe restaurant in the currently fashionable part of Istanbul ‘my environment’? And what are they thinking of me in Kingston, Surrey, right now? Should I care?

I resolve, for the first time really today, to ‘deal’ with the situation. Right up until now, I have been essentially bewildered and in no small measure bemused by my overall predicament, but now it transpires there’s something I must do. This fills me with gloom quite as much as it thrills me. Ideally, I would do nothing. I would sit here and wait for it all—whatever ‘it’ is—to just go away. But conditions are no longer ideal. Whereas until a few minutes ago I was maybe disorientated but principally happy to just exist in a reality that didn’t quite make sense but that would probably, I surmised, explain itself to me in one way or another sooner or later, I am now deeply discomfited. And as the extraordinariness of my state begins to dawn on me, it also begins to impose itself on me with a meaning, a forceful declamation of purpose: it seems to be saying you are here precisely to confront your own younger self. And that is plainly absurd.

The angular waitress is nowhere to be seen and so I halfheartedly wave at a sweet looking colleague of hers who is and has been all smiles. He looks about twenty-seven-and-three-and-a-half-months and wears one discreet earring and a handsome tattoo that encircles his arm below a deliberately high-rolled shirt sleeve. He likes me I think, but then at the moment I am quite likeable, and quite helpless, as I glance up at him and ask him what it was that the young man over there had eaten, offering him an innocent smile: before you interfere with your reality, check it.

He glances halfway over his shoulder and furrows his brow for an instant or two and my heart sinks. There’s nobody there. I’m imagining him, I am losing control. Hah, losing control, I’ve lost it several hours ago, possibly several decades…

He slowly turns back to me and declares: ‘Kebab. Mixed kebab and salad. Are you still hungry?’ – ‘No,’ I reply, only now aware of how odd a question that must have seemed, ‘no, not at all, I was just wondering; it looked nice.’ This satisfies him and from his expectant look I deduce that he thinks I will want to order something anyway, maybe another coffee? I pause for a moment and then say, as if that was the most natural thing in the world: ‘do you think he would mind if I asked him a question?’

Ahmed—I later find out is his name—cocks his head a bit as if to say ‘are you serious?’ but instead, with a still growing smile says: ‘There is no harm in asking a question.’ I am relieved, but not sure that he’s right, necessarily. Would that not depend on the question?

I feel I have caught myself on the hop and I order, somewhat on a whim, a mojito this time round and—sensing my window of opportunity close and the boldness in my adrenalin-fuelled heart wane—ask Ahmed to ask young me (without referring to him as young me, for obvious reasons) if he would join me for one, as I would like to, there not being any harm in asking a question, ask him a question. Ahmed seems to enjoy this task, one he has never, I fancy, been given before, and brazenly marches up to young me and asks me if I would care to join the gentleman over there for a mojito. To my unending surprise I say yes. But then I have always been good for a new conversation, even back then, when I was, or believe to remember being, naturally disposed towards caution.

As I sit there watching myself saunter over to me, I sense an overpowering surge of affection and care. God, I think to myself, if only I knew…

7 Love

Being invisible to the naked eye has the advantage that you can watch and learn.

I sit on a tube train wearing a hat, and I examine the people sitting across from me. Nobody notices, nobody minds. I love looking at people. I love people. I love. I’ve put half a century on the clock and not ever experienced ‘love’, not love in return, not ‘I love you,’ ‘I love you too’ love. I feel love all the time, I gush all aglow at the slightest appearance of beauty or kindness or both or even just quirky adorableness, and I forever fascinate at the troubled soul. But never has anyone whom I felt myself as ‘in love with’ felt that way about me. Or vice versa. That is strange. As it so seems the norm. Then again, I’ve never subscribed to ‘the norm’.

The boy’s sun bleached hair is lighter blond than it would be had he not spent some time on the beach, I assume. I feel like talking to him but I don’t know what to say. And I don’t want to scare him; I remember what I was like when I was that age, and although I was fiercely independent and unselfconsciously ‘cool’, I was also wary of men of the age I am now. They were ancient. And really what was their point. I put myself in his place and imagine myself looking at me from where he’s sitting, still held in a momentary trance, and I find it surprisingly easy to see what he sees and feel what he feels and know what he knows and be what he is and it hits me: I’m he.

Not metaphorically speaking in a similarity kind of way vaguely so, but for real. No wonder he looks so familiar. And so abjectly alien too. I have manoeuvred myself into a space-time-convolution in which for reasons I cannot begin to imagine I am sitting twelve feet away from myself, some twenty-eight years removed. Holy cow.

{Meander}

The strident thrust of a century recently launched, and with great fanfare too. Millennium. Nobody talks about that, no more. (A comma makes all the difference.)

There are aeroplanes flying overhead there are cars on the road there are people in the street about town. Forward motion, always. It likes me not; not always, not now. I long to ease. Not from now on, just for right now. Much needs to be done, but it’s good to do nothing, once in a while; just to float. Relent to slow the flow of time. Be. Not go anywhere. At all. Except you always do, don’t you. You can sit in a spot for eternity and when eternity is over you will have moved. Away from the centre, along the Milky Way, around the star, on your planet’s axis, many times.

Once upon a time in a story I knew this to be true and I said so and I said it was disconcerting, but nonetheless comforting, too. And it was. And it is.

Then a kiss.

6 Descending, Temporarily, into the Unrequired Sludge of Unrequited (at Least to Reciprocal Level) Affection, Again

This happens so regularly, so predictably, I should be inured to it.

I am not.

As if he’d read my mind, the man who doesn’t need to shave, on our second meeting, wears the tiniest hint of stubble. He has spent the night in Peckham, but does not volunteer any more details about why or with whom. My impression is that it was a simple case of crashing at a mate’s house, but that impression may just be wrong. I don’t feel I know him well enough to enquire about this, or the number of days he hasn’t shaved, so I can’t tell whether this is just the result of one night’s morning’s not shaving, or whether it is in fact the protrusion of several days. Faint though it is, it nevertheless intrigues me because it comes up so different to the soft light blond tuft that sits off the lower side of his jaw bone and the two or three long hairs that sprout from his little mole near the back of his cheek. The ‘stubble’, such as it is, shows up in short little thick pins, which compared to the rest of his head appear black.

We sit opposite each other, discussing comedy, I believe, though my mind is only half on it. The other half of my mind—my conscious mind, we’re always talking about, I have far less of a hold, if any, on my subconscious mind, if that isn’t plainly stating the obvious, which plainly it is—is divided into roughly four areas of attention, each approximately equal in measure: one quarter takes in the astonishing, familiar, but nevertheless new-from-this-angle scenery, on The Dove’s terrace in Hammersmith, with Turner clouds in the sky and rowers already back on the river; another quarter takes in the mild tea taste of the light ale my fellow drinker has bought for our second round and that he’d described, after the first sip, as “undeniably unusual but not altogether unpleasant;” a third quarter has registered that the Turner clouds have now once more wholly obscured the sun and I can take off my sunglasses again which I do think is kinder on the person sitting opposite; and the fourth quarter is taking in the person sitting opposite, thinking: you are exactly the kind I would fall in love with, but I won’t, except that I will and if truth be told—and it be!—I already am. Falling. ‘Falling’ is perhaps not the right word: sinking, more like. Slowly, as into quicksand. A calamitous, and thrilling, degrounding, inexorably (or is that just a cliché), into… love?

Maybe not, maybe that would be not only insane—as well as a further profound misapprehension of the heart and the mind and the soul—but most inexcusably a distortion of the truth; and truth, we have already exclaimed, be told! What then, if not love? A glow of untenable, unsustainable, inexplicable, unwarranted, but oh in life indispensable warmth that says: I like you. More than makes any sense. It will pass. It will solidify, the ground. Mush will turn into dependable clay, on which to build. There will be friendship and love there will be friendship and love, and the two will and will not be the same.

Far be it from me to claim that I can’t say I’m not entirely impartial to the occasional quadruple negative…

5 Youth

Talking to the man who doesn’t need to shave fills in me a well of melancholy, sudden and post conversation. The conversation features the most delightful frog in short film history (yet to be made), among many other things that give me mirth and pleasure, not least looking into his silvery eyes. Unlike most other young men of an age at which they don’t have to shave, he holds my gaze, steady as a hypnotist. His eyes are memorably shaped, as if they were placed in his face upside down, just a little. Silvery grey.

The sadness sets in after I’ve left the party at which we spend a couple of hours or so talking as the sun goes down over the back garden. It’s more of a backyard than an actual garden, with wild grass growing all over and a neighbour’s dog actually digging up his there hidden bones. I’d never seen that before, other than in comic books (and I’m not an avid fan or consumer of comics, haven’t been since I was about twelve). It’s not his youth that brings on my deep sorrow verging on despair, nor anything he said nor the fact that he is bright and well spoken nor let alone that he doesn’t seem to need to shave. I reckon I must be close to twice his age but luckily not as old as his dad. His dad sounds ancient and excellent, formidable in one field or another. By age though, I could be his dad. This casts a pall of umbra over my otherwise sanguine disposition.

I know! I’m having my midlife crisis. It’s plain and perhaps just tadwise banal. I am projecting my discomfiture with the impending calamity of fifty onto the part of my mind that clings on to diversion for dear life. I make believe. The irksomeness of my situation begins to creep up on me, like a nebulous mist. (Tautology.) I have made it to midpoint completely unnoticed: I am invisible to the naked eye.

And the next few days will have been cataclysmic, so small wonder I’m having an existential wobble. But the good thing is that this time I did not fall in love: not with my friend on the South Bank (though that would have been easy), not with the young man who doesn’t need to shave. (Easier still.) Most certainly not with Poshvoiced Hoodie and, no, not with the man in a blue shirt at Clapham Junction, should you wonder. (Have you ever noticed how many sprucely scrubbed men, tender in years and wearing ironed blue shirts, stand at any given station on any commutable morning… – It’s a rhetorical question?)

As well as being unfamous I am also perennially poor. My chosen path of professional endeavour has so far yielded no hint of a fortune. This has the advantage that I remain unencumbered, I suppose, by wealth’s weight: what I don’t have I can’t lose, and I know more than I care to reflect on that the things I own own me quite as much. Take my laptop for instance: without it I am nought. I have dislodged myself to the continent’s end but my Mac is still here: I find that reassuring.

I will the straw in my drink to suck up one more residual sip of tomato juice laced with vodka and it complies with a gurgling sound, which attracts the attention of a boy sitting two tables removed. He gives me a look of aloof disdain, and in his eyes, which are the colour of mine, I detect a familiar glint that I cannot put name nor nature to, no. He seems to consider disapproving of me but stops short of a sneer, and his very fine lips instead curl into almost a smile. I’m so surprised at this, I put down my glass and smile back at him, which changes his demeanour to a tinge of distaste.

He, much like the young man who does not need to shave and whom I am yet to meet, has no facial growth, and his lightly tan skin looks fluffdown soft. He appears as out of place here as I do, and quite as at home. Wherein lies a paradox that tickles me and I catch myself grinning just to myself.

The boy lets a few moments pass in contemplation of his plate on which there appears to have been a kebab or salad, as if to decide whether or not he should scrape the remnants of whatever it was with his fork or knife or even fingers (though he doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who, given the choice, would use his fingers to scrape up anything, let alone food); or maybe he’s versed in the mystical art of reading the scraps. As far as I can tell from where I’m sitting (and without ungainlily craning my neck) it looks unlikely that the plate is going to yield up much insight. He appears to come to that same conclusion himself and now looks up, but not at me or at anyone in particular, but into the generality of the world straight ahead, a little bemused and distracted.

I feel like I know him already but clearly I don’t. I have no idea. I have a looming sense of foreboding.

4 The Sultaness (Reclining)

The Sultaness sleeps like a Matisse Nude, a duvet draped over one leg only, casually veiling the sanctity of her majestic vagina. Her arm stretched out over the edge of the mattress, her head inclined tward the window whence barely a breeze now teases the heat of the afternoon, not quite away.

I marvel at her voluminous undulations. How did she get here? Into the imaginarium of my mind, into my brainspace, my own private place of precious wonder?

My Bloody Mary arrives from the creature who reminds me of her as well as of me, and I confer upon myself the privilege of some measured doubt. I could be dreaming: I could be asleep still on the train to Kingston-upon-Thames and wake up any moment now, quite possibly with a hard on. I am not normally given to arousal by women, round-shaped or angular, but hey, if this is a dream then anything might happen. Might it not.

The thought of quite possibly still being asleep reassures me for the time-being, as does the Mary which is Bloody and perfect and has enough of a kick to it to feel real: I begin to relax.