I was born for the love of a friend. The sorrows of life came from resistance to rock-like nature; the joys of living came out of friendship. Blood rouses me to keep my eyes awake; flesh is prone to inertia. The mind is constantly at war, ready to break like a cup held by a string in thin air. Fate is the string, and the body is a cup in the wind.
Fragility is one thing that a torturer cannot confront. Reality is the domain of the torturer. Intoxicated with the power of being, the torturer is determined to break the cup of becoming. Torture frees the body of fragility. Death-like hardness replaces the suppleness of life. The body surrenders to the mind. Mental destiny is tangible. The torturer’s genius aims to possess the real. Torture, like love, is an invention. In acts of torture, imagination declares its mastery over the will. I will, as a divine right, share my oneness with others. As tenderly as music bears silence, I bear the cup of my friend’s body.
The traveler was all too eager for the journey to end. Every platform has its share of waiting faces. You wait in vain, but your heart aches with compassion for all the creatures waiting. Each time you come across a face, you wish to fall to your knees and beg forgiveness from the vast unknown for having failed a face that is not yours. You must die, as do all faces that change trains, because a thing called home waits for them. Perhaps pity dies with you, too. There is no pity between you and me. Yet I find it difficult to believe that stone, water, and clouds are untouched by feelings.
Renunciation is an art that life imitates. History is the silk made out of the body of a worm. I live half a life. If I played a game of dice with the gods, I would choose to lose; that way, I would preserve my integrity as a loser. It could be a fever that exhausts me, or it could be the images of love I carry. My bones are aging; I cannot feel their presence. I have a mild fever and feel disconnected from the walls. The pain of another being is real. The mind is at war with the world that it created. Forgiveness leads me to something other than my mind. Thus, I know you are in the opalescence of green shadows.
Living is an afterthought to a preconception. Bodies flow into bodies, leaving emptiness behind. In the summer’s rancorous heat, the heart is like a river. Water merges with light to come back, as rain quenches the parched throat of land. Perhaps love was made and emptiness realized. Never ask the bedmaker if the beds are real. If bed-making is not a habit, then lovemaking is. I was trying to reach the core of who I am—the sea in the coconut. Ignes Fatui are ligatures that bind me to habits. I could use a horse rider’s habit to break free from the nunnery of chance—a chance I believe I’ve made, much like one makes a fire to stay warm in a forest at night. The imperious gesture failed. Time weakens the vividness of black eyes. Rain brings a tune that I’ve grown accustomed to. Childhood is a recurrence. Atavism conflicts with a quaint desire to perform. I hide in another body’s breast; the desperation to forget is natural. Waves break apart as they plunge into the crimson depths of a pristine sea.
With a shirt on the verge of tearing, I gaze at myself with disquietude. If you witness a child sucking on hard, dry, milkless breasts and a mother as impoverished as a tree stump, art is not a pain reliever. If it wasn’t blood that made the rose red, it might be the suffering of those who deserve better. The humanity of the poor is history rewritten as resistance. Real people, in their individual selves, take away the futility of ideas.
What beckons is not an eye’s glaze but the whiteness of hills leaning against the horizon. Everything outside me is the soul of a being. There are some things that death can resolve. One of us leaves the room, and there’s peace on earth. Vanity has the silence of a shipwreck. Reason is the power to punish. I’m an acolyte to a blind fate, leading me through fire and ice. If your feelings are sacrosanct, then it is fair that I go down the valley to find that speck of dust that birthed the universe. One half of my life is occupied by fighting battles without victories, while the other half requires me to reconcile with words that are a waste of breath. The silence of a mutilated self is barely audible. The mind cannot do without ritual. My capacity for change is limited to beds. The friendship that signifies death is the body relinquishing its claims over reality.
You can’t expect time to bend like a river or spaces to lend their jaws to the unscrupulous dentist called language. If we weren’t fond of imaginary states, we might be fonder of a blade of grass where the dew stands aloof, much like mirrors do in bedrooms. Where was I when the world began? Wanderlust is human. To want to give is equally human. Life is prolonged in a hospital. At home, I contemplated the passing of the stars. My favorite are the days between seasons when winter walks down the aisle with spring. The determination to brood comes from the void of words. You did not need a word called ‘pink’ in order to know dawn. But rain needs the smell of mud, and dancing feet cannot do without music. Something of the other had to be there for the eye to experience the colors of madness.
Prakash Kona is a writer and independent scholar. He completed his doctorate at the University of Mississippi in 1997. His only claim to fame is that he is the only person he has ever met who has read all of Shakespeare and James Joyce's “Finnegans Wake” from cover to cover.