Or a four-message conversation
“Hello? Hello?” I repeated, my needy voice swimming across the mirror to find an echo that might touch me. Or a four-message conversation.
“The full moon is drowning me”, I started, after the revised pleasantries we are all used to; the emotionless one we have sold away to the digitalisations and the empty “fine, thank you,” but it was a beautiful night. A friend, another writer, just got accepted by a prestigious magazine, and I was satisfied. It felt strange, but I was satisfied, and for a while, I was reminded again of what it feels like to be happy; a digression from everything of mine I have kept piling without moving my hands towards the deeds. I remember feeling so ashamed and spent a different evening discussing how we are made only to accept the part of our works that they, who will read it briefly amongst hundreds of thousands of other works, and if the God of Probability shine its light on a line or two that is to our name, we are made not to regret the hours made in making the others afterall. This I found unsatisfactory and kept rambling on and on and on about the voices we are losing to satisfy another editor’s starvation and sometimes their buffet that comes as themes.
My anger is that I knew there was little or nothing that could be done, since the writers are starving too and have lives to live. They have bills to pay. They have lives to live despite the murderous government we both grew up in— one without a knife but all the sharpness to tear your stomach out and leave you to die at the mercy of some bandit who was granted amnesty based on the belief of “change”. That a man who once sliced another’s gut can wash off all the blood in his hands. But tonight there is no blood, and despite the absence of electricity, I am satisfied. The moon has moved a bit closer to our heads, and the roundness is gracious. The people are walking past, and they are giggling at the other gender, and they are in love in a hated country. My phone’s power is low, of course, while I go back into the inbox of this man, a friend, one whom I’ve known with an unembraceable grief, with his arm open to everyone despite how tender the world has beaten him into.
I confess I look up to him, just like everyone else with a known grief, but who still cannot wait to show up tomorrow. I stared back at the moon and observed its mapped face. It was really beautiful. I would like to see it tomorrow. I counted all the stars around it with wishes, and when my eyes could measure feet away from it in wishes, I ran out of words. Was that all I always wanted? It all felt so little. A little circle in this vast, vast sky— but look at all this abundance I have in my eyes already! They are mine, and no one can take them from me. How satisfied I was! My phone rang me down the heavens’ silvery ladder, and for a second, I could have been an angel and might have gotten my body so close to the celestials. I must have had a pair of wings. I can’t look back either; they might have been made from the lightness of the worry I decided to let go for those seconds. I could have remembered and fallen. I could have fallen disastrously.
The people down here, around me, were filled with promises and a murmuring mouth of light in this dark space. This must be heaven’s mirror across the earth’s ocean, I thought as I stared at the sky through the dark of my phone until it buzzed. “Funny how I didn’t see it,” he said. He must have been inside feeding his thoughts with his hungry hands. He must have been away, distracted by his phone. He must have been asleep. He must. I had to grant him enough excuse for why he must have chosen to hide away from living this night. I know of the people around me in their phones and in a fiction that suffers the present. I knew how miserable they had become, but he wasn’t like that; I had to convince myself. The jester must have told the same joke to himself a hundred times to satisfy the king and his audience. Do you think he finds the act funny anymore? Has he killed a part of himself to stay alive, or is he so rich in laughter himself? That night, he returned home with the dimes and washed the paint mask off his face. Can you see the red smile go down the drain? Do you truly believe that in his dreams are unicorns, fairies, and elves? Do you believe the trees they live in don’t twine into ropes and nooses from the moist creepers living off an evergreen tree? Is this also a nightmare? How else can we tell this to God?
The phone buzzed again in that instant. “I see it. It is clear.”
