day 66

I have the usual habit of writing before I sleep. Faintly, just before my soul gives up living and takes her nightly rest, she gives me a little spark to write of words I didn't think of in the day. I definitely have no prior knowledge to what I will (am writing) write, and you most certainly will not know when and how long my pauses are before a sentence is complete.
So if daylight leaks in, and the morning storm ends, I will lie on my bed, hours before daybreak, repeating what she speaks in my mind, and ending the day with a slight fever while I touch some mechanism into life, giving it existence in default black colour.
Perhaps, she's just teasing me. She refuses to let me go to sleep that easily. Appearing either as a page in a book, or a page to be written, she slips easily in and out of my body. Sometimes, she sounds like a pure shadow, hiding at the corner of my room. Sometimes, she changes gender and speaks with a thick French accent, and bores me with French phenomenology. Sometimes, (which happens to be the worst scenario) she preaches to me Hegelian dialectics, in an all-suffocating and spitting hoch Deutsch. Of course, there are favourable moments, when I listen to the tales of malayan tigers, over a glass of sherry, knocking me out immediately into a kafkalesque dream.

sometimes though, she sleeps with me. touches me. and caresses me. confused as it were, I remain speechless, and no voice is heard. my fear overwhelms me and during those moments, I really feel I could never again write or speak. Of course, what seems an hour, is actually five minutes. I shiver with a feverish desire to abandon her. Perhaps, I don't need her. And then I realise, during each nightly ritual, how much I really need her - so that my words can flow, and my stories can be told. These stories are hers as much as they are mine. And so, I can't live without her. Or rather, she's always a part of me. A dangerous and bittersweet, part of me.

So I never switch off the lights of my room. I'm afraid she would be gone. (I'm afraid I'll stop writing). I cannot write in the dark. I have no praise for the dark. such emptiness. the shapes disappear. and the sounds take over. I don't dare to anticipate the dreams that will come. I like to be told beforehand. Hence, I frequently stare into the oblivion and with luck, I find her standing, pouting, all gorgeous and yet so flirtatious. Her allure is poison. Her gift is marvellous. If I masturbate, it's because the words are dying - she's not there. If I preach, it's because the words are also dying - she's screaming. If I keep quiet, it's because she's with me - we are doing nothing, just soaking in the stardust of the early morning, and breathing in the washed swirl of the air. And she reminds me ever so often that I'm still a boy. A boy in this world he thought he could abandon. But the world will never abandon you. To the world, you're just a crying baby, kicking and needy - the need to be controlled and led -and so the only thing I can do, is to wait for my lover, and write my way out of this world, even as the world opens her arms around me, waiting for me to fall with abandonment. To carry on, I must know who she is. To carry on, I must wait for her, every night, every hellish night.

And as I am writing this, I can peep with the corner of my eyes - she, standing still, with a slight tilt of her head, staring at me, as if I have been naughty...