I am out of cigarettes and furthermore, there is only the plum wine left.
A half-full bottle, the wine is, where it has been since those happy days when it was first drunk. A night of celebration and joy when I dared to be happy, when I had the audacity to believe that everything would be beautiful everafter in my life.
When I could believe in fairy tales and myths and legends. When I smiled fondly on lazy Erec, proud Yvain and simple Parzival.
I can no longer stand des Troyes and even Cervantes' mad Don and Dumas's redemptive Count, formerly my most loved hero, are hateful to me.
For they were able to find some happiness at some point.
I, too, was happy once. A daughter of the Far East smiled for me and me alone, my career was rising, my parents were proud and all the world toasted me as one destined for greatness.
And then it all came tumbling down. Things fall apart yes, Mr. Achebe, but the fall was all the more spectacular for the promise I held. Cliches are tired to the intellectual elite, but their weariness on outsiders is nothing to those who have to live through it.
Who have to be the golden boy, the ascending star, who suffers a great calamity, treachery from all sides and the kind of betrayals that undo entire kingdoms.
I am already tired of my own banalties.
42 was supposed to be the answer, but I am now 45 and there are no answers. There is only my decaying body, marching steadily on to the great unknown oblivion of death, the pace hastened by too much smoke and too drunk as I sit night after night, staring at the flicker of the television, of the computer screen.
Staring at the fantasy worlds that electronics create, the vistas of neat and tidy resolution of conflicts and situations that bear no resemblance to reality for men such as me.
My story is not fantastic and yet, every day I relive their chapters in my mind, searching for the points where another path might have reversed everything, might have prevented my eventual ruin.
But such discoveries, found under guise of wine and tobacco, only augment the despair, for the chances are lost, the opportunities a soft knock that no longer appear at my door.
...I am tired, exhausted really and yet sleep does not come. She smirks, coy in her vixen's garb, heavy, obsidian hair waterfalling all about her, her scent jasmine and her eyes a startling light blue.
Sleep is a woman, in spite of what the ancients would say. It is possible, I suppose that Morpheus was adrogynous enough to be mistaken for a woman, but -my- nocturnal sylph who witholds slumber's restorative balm from me is female in form.
I have spent the past three weeks and more doing nothing of significance. I say three weeks because it is that precise period in which the sense of oppression and loss has grown more acute than ever.
An innocent cream-coloured invitation with black type sits on the table. No, not innocent. It is a devil in square shape. Or perhaps a snake. Fire, poison, it's all the same in the end.
I shiver, my body ice.
Enough, enough.
I will drink. Drink the half-sweet, half-bitter draughts of memory in this plum wine. Proust, that windbag pederast, needed only tea. -I- need something stronger to shatter the conscious and wander the half-picturesque, half-horrifying gardens of the past.
Dumas's black tulip is a perfect symbol. Death and beauty intertwined.
And perhaps the final beyond is the greatest bliss of all.
But I can not stay like this. I must lose myself in something. The East is to be avoided at all costs. West, west by God, let it be West!
...Ah, yes. The story of the most underappreciated Jimenez branch. It is hard to get further west than that in the time period that is my favorite in history still, even in spite of the pain of the romances.
For I, too, have become unappreciated.
It is too late for me, but perhaps I can find some small solace in telling of -this- Jimenez man and his descendants... How they rose from obscurity into the greatest of all Jimenezs.
Yes, that is remote enough from everything.
And so I shall begin.
After another glass of tears and melancholy.
A half-full bottle, the wine is, where it has been since those happy days when it was first drunk. A night of celebration and joy when I dared to be happy, when I had the audacity to believe that everything would be beautiful everafter in my life.
When I could believe in fairy tales and myths and legends. When I smiled fondly on lazy Erec, proud Yvain and simple Parzival.
I can no longer stand des Troyes and even Cervantes' mad Don and Dumas's redemptive Count, formerly my most loved hero, are hateful to me.
For they were able to find some happiness at some point.
I, too, was happy once. A daughter of the Far East smiled for me and me alone, my career was rising, my parents were proud and all the world toasted me as one destined for greatness.
And then it all came tumbling down. Things fall apart yes, Mr. Achebe, but the fall was all the more spectacular for the promise I held. Cliches are tired to the intellectual elite, but their weariness on outsiders is nothing to those who have to live through it.
Who have to be the golden boy, the ascending star, who suffers a great calamity, treachery from all sides and the kind of betrayals that undo entire kingdoms.
I am already tired of my own banalties.
42 was supposed to be the answer, but I am now 45 and there are no answers. There is only my decaying body, marching steadily on to the great unknown oblivion of death, the pace hastened by too much smoke and too drunk as I sit night after night, staring at the flicker of the television, of the computer screen.
Staring at the fantasy worlds that electronics create, the vistas of neat and tidy resolution of conflicts and situations that bear no resemblance to reality for men such as me.
My story is not fantastic and yet, every day I relive their chapters in my mind, searching for the points where another path might have reversed everything, might have prevented my eventual ruin.
But such discoveries, found under guise of wine and tobacco, only augment the despair, for the chances are lost, the opportunities a soft knock that no longer appear at my door.
...I am tired, exhausted really and yet sleep does not come. She smirks, coy in her vixen's garb, heavy, obsidian hair waterfalling all about her, her scent jasmine and her eyes a startling light blue.
Sleep is a woman, in spite of what the ancients would say. It is possible, I suppose that Morpheus was adrogynous enough to be mistaken for a woman, but -my- nocturnal sylph who witholds slumber's restorative balm from me is female in form.
I have spent the past three weeks and more doing nothing of significance. I say three weeks because it is that precise period in which the sense of oppression and loss has grown more acute than ever.
An innocent cream-coloured invitation with black type sits on the table. No, not innocent. It is a devil in square shape. Or perhaps a snake. Fire, poison, it's all the same in the end.
I shiver, my body ice.
Enough, enough.
I will drink. Drink the half-sweet, half-bitter draughts of memory in this plum wine. Proust, that windbag pederast, needed only tea. -I- need something stronger to shatter the conscious and wander the half-picturesque, half-horrifying gardens of the past.
Dumas's black tulip is a perfect symbol. Death and beauty intertwined.
And perhaps the final beyond is the greatest bliss of all.
But I can not stay like this. I must lose myself in something. The East is to be avoided at all costs. West, west by God, let it be West!
...Ah, yes. The story of the most underappreciated Jimenez branch. It is hard to get further west than that in the time period that is my favorite in history still, even in spite of the pain of the romances.
For I, too, have become unappreciated.
It is too late for me, but perhaps I can find some small solace in telling of -this- Jimenez man and his descendants... How they rose from obscurity into the greatest of all Jimenezs.
Yes, that is remote enough from everything.
And so I shall begin.
After another glass of tears and melancholy.
