written: 17 September 2013
Maybe I am imagining this, but the porridge smells like you. Yes, somehow the ingredients and the spices interact in such way producing similar scent that your perfume generates reacting with the chemicals of your skin. Given I am missing you; maybe that’s just in my head, yet again, maybe there is more to that.
I finished the serving on my bowl and help myself for another. This is the fourth consecutive morning I have this porridge for breakfast, but still I savor every spoon of it. Besides, there is plenty of it in the giant pot in the kitchen. I better eat it all before it goes bad.
The porridge tastes great despite the sorrow your absence is inflicting upon me. I heard laughter from the back of my mind. I know this laughter well, though it’s been a while. It is mine, my old self that is: my detached, modern, independent self that has been imprisoned since you exhaust its pride.
How different could two phrases be in a sentence? It says mockingly. Yes, the porridge tastes great, and yes you are not here. The two mutually exclusive phrases do not need the word despite to connect them. The porridge would taste no better (and no worse) had you been here, that seems to be the obvious case for my pride lacking proud pal, my old self-conscious.
But I have experienced cases where even my most favorite food did not stir my appetite for my mind was too busy thinking about how to get you back in my life. That was not for just one or two days, but a whole couple of weeks! Thus, my current self-conscious appreciates the use of despite in the sentence. After all, it says in defend, I can feel that the porridge tastes great even though you’re not here with me. That’s the point, maybe I am moving on. Maybe this is just what I need, a delicious porridge that happens to smell like you.
Pathetic! Now every part of me agrees. This is exactly the problem of being attached to someone, when they leave, you just feel lost. You have been a part of me and now I don’t know what to be without you around. Pathetic!
I remember myself preaching about these Machiavellianism and post-modernism ideas. The center point of Machiavellianism is the idea of compartmented life. Every different aspect of one’s life is stored in a different compartment. Therefore, when one compartment is a mess, the others are not affected. The idea first developed in the field of architecture, it is applied to make sure that if there was a fire in a room of a building, all the other rooms, and ultimately the building, wouldn’t get burned down. This is the idea that makes sure that people still excel in their work no matter how their personal life is; makes
sure that a person still function well physically even though they are mentally broken down; makes sure that the porridge would still taste great whether or not you are present.
What an effective idea! However, just like a scholar finding the practical world to be a wee bit different, I found that that is not always the case. There are things you just can’t control. You came into my life and invaded all my compartments.
Maybe I was asleep then. Maybe I was asleep when you wrapped your limbs around me. Maybe I was asleep when you kissed me for the first time. Maybe I was asleep when you whispered to my ear that you loved me. Maybe I was asleep when you broke down all my walls. Maybe I was asleep and I let my guard down.
Your touch was soft, your kiss was warm, and your words were kind. You tapped on my door and I let you in. But now you are colder than a harsh winter.
But hey, the walls of my compartments are starting to build up. At least the wall between you and the porridge has been built, to keep your cold wind from blowing at this warm steaming meal I am having for breakfast this morning.
I eat spoon after spoon of the delicious porridge. The clock ticks 7 o’clock reminding me that I have to depart for work in fifteen minutes. My work starts at 8 and the bus takes 20 minutes to get me to the nearest station, 5 minutes walk from my office, 8 if I walk slowly, 3 minutes if I take longer strides. It means that I have to take the 7.24 bus from the stop near my house. The time it takes for me to walk to that stop is 7 minutes on average with the standard deviation of 0.02 minutes, which means that I almost always get there in 7 minutes.
Fifteen more minutes, there is still plenty of time to finish my porridge. I can listen to three to four songs from my home stereo before I leave the house. I sip my coffee, it doesn’t smell like you but I don’t expect it to. It tastes great, as always, I am always fond of coffee. The stereo is playing a sad song from my player. But this one does not have anything to do with you either; most of the songs I keep in my laptop are slow so they have more probability to be shuffled into. Don’t flatter yourself on this.
Then the player shuffled to the soundtrack of a movie that is criticized to be post-modernist. What a coincidence, since I finished thinking about you and Machiavellianism, I am just starting to think about you and post-modernism.
Post-modernism is a little bit harder to describe than Machiavellianism. That is mainly because the heart of post-modernism is the lack of definition.
What we had was something we cannot define. But I thought that, under the fuzzy fog of confusion, at the base we were friends. But thanks to you, I found out that some people put expiration dates on their friends and we have no way of knowing this until we are, well, expired.
How does someone let go and forget everything about something that was very close to them? I remember asking myself the first week you left me. An answer came to me in a revelation. Ask snakes,
they shed their skin from time to time. Couldn’t say that it was a useful answer, but well, it is true. After all, you’re not answering any of my questions usefully, so any answer was welcome.
If the heart of post-modernism is the lack of definition, the body of the stream would be not asking questions. The school of thought fit well with people who could not or would not describe their feeling. I have done this before, in fact, I have excelled on this.
From the beginning, you and I both knew that it was going nowhere. We didn’t care and we did it anyway. We weren’t sure how it began; sometimes it was you who came to me, while other times I came to you. At nights, one would hug the other and the other would hug the other back. We would kiss tenderly at first, brushing our lips to the other’s cheeks, or neck, or hands, or forehead, or shoulders. Then it would get more passionate and our lips would lock. At first I would close my eyes, but then I decided to open it because I wanted to see your eyes as you do this to me. I wanted to see myself in your eyes, and I would be able to see you smile with them. Maybe that’s how I got lost in you.
Then one night you stole my breath by saying, “I love.” I didn’t know if I was ready for that sentence, I thought that it was not necessary and it would define things we’d rather left undefined. But then I could breathe again when you added the object, “your voice.” “I love… your eyes,” “I love… your smell.” And then we fell asleep on each other’s embrace. For a few nights we did this, I would tease you back saying “I love… your hair,” “I love… your eyes too”, “I love… your voice too”, “I love… your smell too.”
But then one night, just before we fell asleep, you whispered in my ear “I love you.” There were butterflies in my stomach, but I slept with a smile on my face and I woke you up the next morning with a kiss and an “I love you, too.” You smiled and held me, and we stayed in bed for some more time.
Once or twice, you would start asking things. But then I would stop you, sometimes by putting a finger on your lips and other times by sealing them with my own lips. I would say things like, “do not scar this with a definition,” “let it be what it is,” “it will end when it ends.”
You would say that that is very post-modernist of me. I would laugh because at the time I had just told you about post-modernism a few days back. Then you would rephrase my favorite speech about it. “We cannot refrain ourselves from feeling, thus we refrain from expecting instead.” That was supposed to be the spine of our relationship, no expectation. But once again the scholar found the practical world to be that much different. Expectation, it seems, is the soul of feeling. One could not help but to expect (or at least wish) longevity for the feeling happy, or a lifting up cheer for the feeling sorrow, or a revenge for the feeling angry.
