Black Waters

“Hey”, I said, uncomfortably avoiding eye contact. Restlessly rubbing hands together, searching for a way to start talking again after years… so many years… teetering about the corners of a smoke infested room.

“you need nothing…" “a familiar person said, “you never did”

“it’s been so long, I’m scared of letting you down. letting myself down… to find out I’m not you anymore”

“you never will… you never can… I exist because of you… and you do because of me”

He looked. After years he looked up, lifting his eyelids like two pieces of cinder-block, and he saw him again… the sandals, the skull cap, that kaleidoscope guy…

I write after 3 years. A little older, a littler uglier, some wrinkles that I carry well, some marks that I don’t. Some hard-earned victories, and some wounds – fresh, warm and blood soaked. Some blemishes, blots, smears of my unruly disposition, my unlovable mold and a mountainous ego.

As someone who wrote stories to float in the waves of troubling times, like a drowner in an ocean, I chose to hop onto a boat of comfort. And atop the boat I fell in love with the embrace of a prepossessing sea maiden, luscious auburn hair that glistened in front of the moonlight.

Her voice felt alleviating and melodic, as if Apollo himself played a hymn on his harp to allure me. Her skin felt like a fabric weaved out of a heavenly loom. A metaphysical apparition, an enigmatic spirit, seemed false but so real? To no surprise, I was charmed, enchanted and instantly fell prey to love.

As she touched and healed my dead and broken limbs, she smiled and had me smitten. She inflicted me with a mirth unbeknownst, a pleasure uncanny, a lust untameable.

As the black waters around me called, the kaleidoscope guy gazed from the deep dark depths never uttering a word. I lay there on the boat, safe, under the warm embrace of the maiden.

Years passed, the maiden kept loving, caring, stitching my lacerations and abstaining me off my sins. But the soul of a man is crystalline, once addicted to the pangs of solitude and containment, no amount of love can keep him together, and I was no different.

As I lived on, the will inside me kept getting weaker though on the outside I remained intact. The maiden had cared far too much, for far too long. And one night when she turned away, tired and withered, my will shattered.

My inescapable desire to drown in the black waters was too much for the maiden to bear. I wept for her, and tried to not submit… to the echoing blackness inside me, the ravine of emptiness, the cold dreary black waters that I call my home…

She understood but didn’t. She smiled one last time but didn’t. she knew I had to do this, I was turning into a grotesque figure of disdain and discomfort… I was capricious, lacked lenience, and perhaps complacently believed that despite all my imperfections she will never leave, believed that Apollo will never stop playing… and how abruptly did he stop…

I leaned back… pushed away… leaned back a little more… she turned towards me apace, the maiden with her luscious auburn hair… but they weren’t luscious anymore, I had sapped her of her beauty, her skin defiled and wilted, not anymore like heavenly fabric but more like a piece of cloth used to scrub a course malignant object.

“Push harder you evil man, push harder…” I thought to myself, “… before you kill her, because she is ready to die for you… push harder and fall already, you accursed vermin”

Splash…

And I fell, the maiden rushed to the edge of the boat and leaned in. Her tears touched the water before her gaze, and how the tears made a louder splash than my fall. The reverberating sound of which slowly diminished as I sunk deeper in the black waters.

Deeper I fell, back in the tight cold grasp of my home. I could see her mercurial image looking at me as I go deeper, almost invisible now but she looks on still, I know.

I write again after 3 years, in my house of abject loneliness. I am one with the kaleidoscope guy, familiar walls surround me, stacks of paper with illegible scribbles, dust, smoke, cacophonous silence, peace of mind and an unfathomable happiness.

“Welcome home…” he said… we said…