I took that stroll of mine.... at the desired time of my day when darkness has shrouded the world.... listening to Omar’s Passage into Midnight... swinging my hand like it was making love to the strings of a violin.... I love this time of mine....it’s like standing perpetually under a mistletoe kissing the sweetness of one’s own existence... my walk through the forest of my thoughts.... wondering over the remnants of all that happened during the day... and how I pained to pen it down to words... not all the time can one do it...
And it is that moment that I had relived that exact day when I had seen Dr Flake and Ms Hide in one of those crazy excursions I had taken... a sojourn with unknown acquaintances, a tent in the forest, trekking through unknown terrain and it was on one such trip that I met this guy.... the exhaustion of the trek that was trying to die out in the midst of a bonfire and with people trying to drown their fatigue in spirit and music.... sitting leaning against the bark of an old tree... the light against him... just the shadow of a silhouette.... a muscular body, the one that women would just want to look so longingly at and give those very silent sighs ...
I walked up to this shadow, wine in hand, hoping to strike up that conversation... which I hoped would satiate one’s curiosity... just those simple questions of who are u... what do u do... do u live in (hopefully the city where I live...etc etc....) ... and with that hope walked up to him.... and said the proverbial hi.... he looked up from his glass (realized that he had been staring at the still liquid floating in his glass for a while).... and smiled... stood up and came out of the shadows.... it was like a blessing emerging... that one single moment of happiness that one searches for.... it was the pair of eyes that had captured that instantaneous moment of satisfaction that we yearn for.... a pair that I had never ever seen before... deep, silent, pacifying and loving.... it was a sight that would take away the fatigue of the day.... eyes that u would implore to have touch every sensation of your being.... just sampling the check you out look!!!
The conversation went on for a while... more a monologue.... with me doing the talking and his eyes and lips usually in synchronicity nodding away in agreement or just smiling in disagreement.... it wasn’t the need to listen to my own voice that made me continue speaking as much as to watch that smile that would gush into his eyes making my whole world dance.... sensing the slightest of sensations.... feeling the earth revolve, the slight so slow movement, the slight crackling of the bonfire which was on its way of dying out... the touch of that slight doggamer that grazed through my hand earlier that morning... a web I just didn’t see but the slightest of its glue that I felt....
I stopped suddenly, turned, and walked away... fully aware of the abruptness of the halt.... my ears were blistering ... for no reason whatsoever... I walked away abashed and ashamed.... “Isn’t he something? Did he make your heart pound; I see your ears are searing..... Well, that is the effect he has on all”... a voice whispered into my ear... I turned to see this little lady looking up at me.... and despite her slight stature and demeanour she had managed to whisper these so comforting words right into my ear....
These are those well defined moments that occur in one’s lifetime.... a flash when someone from the world of homo sapiens includes you in the race and the very fact of inclusion disbars you from festering any adversarial feelings towards humanity.... I looked at her relieved and strained and said “yes ... there is something magnetic about him....and I wonder what?”..... She smiled, took my hand seated me on a tree trunk that seemed to have been put there at that very moment for me.... it was like being in touch with your roots.... ironically!!! “Well, he is a lesbian....and that is the reason he has this effect on you!”....
Funny are the ways of the human language....”Gay you mean... !”..... “No, I meant a lesbian....” and she smiled....”do you recall how he introduced himself...? What did he say was his name?” I pressed the rewind button... reeling back moments of my talking to him...”hi,” he had said” “I am Flake Anna Hide”.... and not for one moment had it struck me as being different... a guy with a girl’s name.....”U mean he is a girl trapped in a man’s body? I don’t understand....!”
And what ensured was a tale that I had never ever heard before.... a tale that is impossible to believe in..... that left me wondering of the varying impossibilities of the human psyche... and the fear of delving deep into anyone’s or for that matter one’s own psyche.... a person with 2 personalities.... one as a man and the other as a woman.... it sounds absurd but true... I just cannot recall his name beyond Flake right now... this was a Dr Flake and Ms Hide.... a lady most of the times hiding in the shadows of a Flake.... he had moved through life with these 2 personalities... coexisting beautifully ... appealing to people the way HE needed to.... and one would wonder at times who he really was.... who was the overriding personality... was it the guy or the girl....
There could be a lot of psychoanalyses that one could possibly do on this... the what and the why.... however; at that moment when I was told about the truth (or was it the truth?) just one thought struck me.... what is it about him that attracted me the most...his male demeanour or his just so soft and deep eyes.... whatever it was, the feeling was that of making out.... so often women talk about the times when they make out with their loved and not so loved ones... of the magical and the not so magical moments...guess the magical moments when one is touched the way one wants to be.... and at times I wonder if it is really true that only a woman knows how another woman should be touched? Somehow, I thought ...’I guess not’... he had touched my existence just the way I had wanted him to...
Embarrassed by these thoughts I moved on... wondering on the shreds of human nature... you touch a human being and what you get is a small flake of it... the little that you know and have reached out to.... and when you meet the person again, it’s something different again... like a snake that sloughs off its skin and grows a new one.... is it a new being all together? One really wonders..... and what’s more intriguing is the impact that one event has on you... and the ripple effect it creates.... the linking of unrelated moments... as if we WANT to link them.... and somehow somewhere in that moment of truth when I had recognized the ambivalence of Dr Flake and Ms Hide, was ingrained my moment of understanding my self mate... (as against a soul mate which recognizes the existence of the other... the self mate in love with oneself!)
It was all about a person struggling to work through innumerable and inane priorities.... we prioritise our work, ourselves, our needs, our work life.... and somewhere hidden amidst all of that was the need of the person to look at things as they are... as the self wishes it to be.... Flake and Hide had managed to sift through the myriad moments of a perfectly routine day seeking solace in the immediate of that self that was supreme at that moment in time... so, if Flake was the power, it was the strong man.... and if Hide decided to come forth, it was the softness that burst out... both blending in one being.... the world saw it as schizophrenia... a disorder.... I see it as the sub conscious self enabling a person to deal with all that one desires ... just at THAT moment in time – power and submissiveness, strength and gentleness ... all of the yin and yang rolled into one....
“If we talk to God, its prayer... if God talks to us its schizophrenia!?” one wonders of the irony of this statement..... And Flake Hide had been diagnosed Schizophrenic!!!! And it was as if at that precise moment I felt God talking to me... the schizophrenia in me surfacing.... a man walking through the night in pitch darkness bursting his torch through the wilderness lightened a small part of an overgrown shrub; and as if destiny just then would so have it.... the headlights of a passing vehicle cloaked it with a beam.... Life was such I guess when we see moments of reality wearing the veil of truth peering at us through those small fissures, unveiling the paramecium disparities between one another in our lives...and then we see them all fused together revealing the so called bigger picture, the whole being.... Moments of schizophrenia!!!! Listening to the sound of the fission in our fusions....
The story of Flake and Hide was all encompassing the reality of each of our existence.... MY existence.... the real me or us revealing in its most vulnerable, soft and weak moments ....to our alter egos and to our self and soul mates... dancing through together hallucinating each other’s reality....
