Everyone here, a slave to their freedom. Giving it labels of meaning. Me too… I am a writer. I am someone. We all just don’t want to work. We all just want someone to tell us that all this pain is worth it.
Jesus… What have you done?
I didn’t pray for anything for a reason.
We wake up, Ayelen sleeping beside me, sweet and deep like a lolly at the bottom of the ocean. Her face the same as it would have been when she was twelve years old. Innocent and placid. Her brown skin invites me to touch her, and I do, and then she speaks, and all innocence is lost. We walk together to the beach that is not far away. I do yoga with her. Yes, she’s another one, beautiful and did the whole go to India to find something thing. Like me, I just realised a little earlier than her that there is nothing to find. Still she searches, hoping for something to save her. It definitely won’t be me.
The yoga is like scratching an itch my soul has complained about for years.
“Stretch to the sky and allow air into your vertebrae,” says my Latina yogi.
I want to grab her and fuck her right there on the beach. Sometimes. Other times my sunburn is too much and the sand sticks to my forehead feeling like sandpaper. My muscles moan as if they’re having an orgasm. We flow together and then meditate. It opens up a passage the alcohol occasionally attains but more often closes. The dream realm. The fourth dimension where time does not exist. I have memories I haven’t had yet. I walk in dreams I have had. I am stuck between the real world and this one, knowing something of nothing. From there I order a coffee and learn my Spanish.
I tell Ayelen, “When I die and my life flashes before my eyes, I can’t wait to watch this again.”
She replies, “Baby, shut the fuck up.”
She does not realise she is spitting in the face of my inner child, the one I've died a thousand times to keep alive.
We end up on the scooter. Gliding through the green palm trees of Koh-phangan. The air is a lovely reprieve from the thick humid heat that summons the sweat from your flesh. Sitting on the beach with peace on both sides of my eyes it’s as if there's a beautiful cosmic coincidence. As if the pope and the Dalai lama were in the same café by accident. The calm waters soothe all the woes I have ever had, now forgotten unless I read on them back. So this is it?
What a coward you are.
To sell your house to find answers in the pain of India. To give everything up because you are going to hurl yourself into a volcano and write books with your screams. Now after a few months you're watching the peach of the sky invigorate your photos as the sun falls into the ocean. Where beautiful people walk around on their brief holidays. Whilst couples get their two weeks a year and train for their photos on the beach. And you, Riley, are sitting there content and happy?
With the best-looking girl on the island…
Having done what exactly?
But I told you, I found the blank scroll. I saw the brains of the great thinkers splattered on the wall after trying to figure it out.
But I guess that is it. You have settled the score. The vibrations of your frequency have calmed and now there is silence…
So you would have thought. So you would have hoped.
Yet the illusions show themselves again and again. In the form of people. In the form of that girl you told yourself you loved. In the form of the most boring mundane cunts talking about how we are alchemists creating magic in the cosmos. The same people who are self-centred and full of bullshit. The same people who will greet a stranger with love and compassion but lie to their mothers. Cheat on their spouse. They’re tricking others to trick themselves. They are keeping the dream alive. The blissful dilated pupils.
Me, give me a drink. Give me fifteen drinks. Give me none. Just give me something. Something honest.
And I know, I am full of shit, and here I go, saying it.
I could never be with her, but she makes me not want to be with anyone else. The stupid writer in me yearning for a legacy. She just needs to say, "I love you."
So I can never think of her again. I'm bored and she does not understand me, she’s too busy to consider it. Do I understand her? I could analyse it all, but where would it be coming from? She shows love and I take it all back. What stupid control she has mustered. What stupid eyes she has.
Then the empathy taps on the bedroom window. She’s just a little girl. More scared than you. Praying someone has what she is looking for. And many pretend they do so it keeps the pursuit pulsating. Those cunts.
Everyone here, a slave to their freedom. Giving it labels of meaning. Me too… I am a writer. I am someone. We all just don’t want to work. We all just want someone to tell us that all this pain is worth it.
I still (even though this underlying disgruntlement would trick the thought) watch the peach sky and feel bliss. Feel emotional and perfect. A lucid dream ill soon awake from to fall into the next nightmare that works together to create fiction I deem real.
Why can’t everyone be like me? I say,
Why can’t I be like everyone else? I say a few moments later.
