Crimes
I was awakened in the night’s pitch-blackness, and started reminiscing. The howling inside my head had subsided, so did the desolation, the solitude.
The fact that others were dreaming at this very moment pacified me. I was only lonely when surrounded by others.
I checked my email, she had replied. “I still hate life,” so she wrote at the end. I wrote back to her that I woke up thinking randomly, about sociology– the sui generis , the humanity, the social interaction, the physicality of our being.
No no, but this cannot be true. It was simply because I was hungry; I’d eaten nothing but roasted potatoes for dinner.
Or was it because of another girl whose life came across mine, just recently?
–the girl who was by all means in a different world than I’d been, in whom I ferreted for common nature and trust and even intimacy between us, in a rather impetuous manner, and seemed to be failing miserably against her equivocalness. It was as though I intruded into her life, and she mocked me with her nonchalance and complete lack of opinions.
I tried to read some more of Wolff’s short stories. “Migraine,” the story was called. A girl who came home with a stifling headache watching the boxes in her apartment as the other girl–her lover perhaps–was about to move out.
I was drawn into the story, beatified by its succinct lines of poetry, its lyricism–not engrossed nevertheless because I kept reflecting over my own life and writings. The stories were short, but with no lack of the power to make me sit up in silence and wonder: How much passion and energy it takes to write such lines that seemed to contain life’s nuances, verbatim. I’d attempted the same before and the feeling was all but unpleasant, even excruciating. It felt like a long, invisible tube had transfixed me and sucked the pith of my life, my existence, out of me.
Yet I kept on thinking. How we were two sensitive souls, timid and maudlin, but never pretending, for these feelings were truer than most others would imagine.
I thought how I would one day finish up all the writings I’d begun, like putting together the missing pieces of a puzzle, or more likely, giving end to a redemption left out cold. Lines of narratives always filled me, a protection-mechanism against vanity. So in this life I knew I’d either write, or become consumed by the compulsion to write.
As I watched the Prussian blue unveiling a new day, I finished the letter: “Hate life all you can, hate it with a passion,” for not only that hating asks for a lot more than loving, but it is also better than nothingness, than living in a lie without realizing it, as if not living at all.
better a crime of passion than a crime of vanity.
