thoughtful

Для сегодняшних именинниц bluet и nutka. One novel ... worth to read. We have been permanently engaged to be married for the past five years now. We intend to remain so for as many years as we manage to live out.I first met her in the pouring rain coming back from the railway station in the evening. In a falling darknes compounded by the rain, hard as it was to see anything, a strain as it was on the eyes to focus, I decided to stop for tea in a place that looked clean, warm and tube-lit through its long glas windows. Sparse and neat, with its currently meagre population seated on emphatically right-angular tables and benches, and lots of empty spaces in between, the place yet encouraged feelings of homely comfort and warmth. I resigned from the popular bustle outside, as people still strangely hurried through what was by now a dreary drizzle, to join those seated inside.We entered almost together, shoulders touching and swiftly moving away, eyes meeting and dispersing, water running off our faces in lines. We must have been mad to have recklesly got drenched in this rain, to have thought of coming to the station unarmed with an umbrella like the rest.Alone, in a restaurant, one behaves differently. Coincidentally, or otherwise, having chosen seats in good view of each other, we looked shiftily in all directions to be able to throw that odd glance at each other. At that moment it was nothing more than just another posibility (and I was already tiring of posibilities). But over the steaming cups of brew placed before us, through that hot mist, we could observe each other more steadily.To no end and purpose apparently, because she paid her bill and went out, and so did I. That was my first meeting with her. It had even stopped drizzling by the time I came out and looked again at the world.A year later or so, picking books from a library, I recognised her. Standing at the corner of a rack, as if half undecided about the book she had in her hands, I caught her eyes flitting from the page she pretended to read, to me, and back. Perhaps she was reinforcing her memory with repeated appraisals. What should I say or do? After all that was a year ago and was it really her anyway? As I hesitated between my book and that corner, she came up to me, with eyes full upon me now, and said, ‘Tea?’Laughter succeeded, but how do I describe it? We both laughed even though she had meant her question in good earnest and I took it as such. It is hard to describe the laughter that always seems to be taking place between us, in the spaces between our bodies. At times I’m amazed, even while I laugh with her laughter, and in her laughter, at how the jingles of our bellies mingle, and how the timbres of our voices seem to be in such good symmetry and harmony. Which is all to say that it is wonderful to laugh with her laughter, and in her laughter, to make laughter together, looking into our own two pairs of eyes, that gleam with the light. It is as if her whole body trembles with the happines of the mirth, and her laughing voice isues from somewhere deep inside her chest, and her breasts seem rounder at the moment. And something happens inside my chest as well, at that moment, an irresistible urge to take her unto me, in my arms, to be permanently wedded together in this music and harmony, in the fashion that we have permanently become engaged to each other. The enduring provisionality of this device keeps us inviolably in love with each other. We took tea together and have taken several more teas together since. It is one of the more beautiful simpler pleasures of life. To share a cup of tea that we do not share, drinking out of our respective cups, to share the feeling that binds us both, together, at this moment, to the steaming beverage. The winter afternoons made even warmer and the summer evenings made even more free, sitting beside or face to face with each other, sipping at it. Two little souls with two little cups of tea, affianced to each other for the entire permanence of that moment. From the fullnes to the emptines, till we refill again, maybe immediately or maybe only a few months later, it is always the same permanence again, for the short while that we sit and take tea together. Timeles days have been vouchsafed us, moments of gold, and these always after periods of apartnes, whether months or days or hours. I still remember the simple and exquisite pleasure of walking that road together, rain-washed and wide (because empty), tree-lined beneath a still cloud-laden sky, heading round in circles for yet another cup of tea, and heading off in yet another direction, again, looking at the same things with our own two pairs of eyes. Timeles days, moments of gold. Why should this be so, I wonder. Why is it that, living together, the bigger units of time seem not to matter such a lot as these beads of transient union, strung together on the necklace of time? Why is separation – mental, emotional, physical, in time, in space – the thread of union, even as we are unmistakably apart while being with each other?For we are ourselves, two distinct beings and bodies. And we love each other’s othernes. The folklore of romance speaks of a mystical union, a merging and mixing of two entities, for the reduction, or enhancement, of two to one. But we haven’t yet reached the stage of I am you and you are I. At least I find myself constantly on the verge of exclaiming – ‘But look at you! You are you!’ And so she is, and that is the wonder. Another – a woman – my other, whom I eternally love. I love you, your being you, your othernes.Normally, one hates one’s Other because one hates oneself or one has so little knowledge of oneself. My problem was that I was never totally convinced that ‘I’ (the I that was thinking and feeling) had anything to do with this body, this name or this social context. It took me a long time to arrive at the fact that I am I, and even now I’m not completely there. Even now I feel as if I slide daily on slippery ground, and this is when I feel closest to that much-vaunted mystical union of two in one, because now I have you to fall into. You gave me my I, bestowed upon me the unspeakable honour, I realise that I am I because I can see that you are you and can love you so much for it. For otherwise what have I to do with all this, this job, this hair that is turning white, this world that is going wrong, or all the routine joys and frustrations? But with you I know that I am I and you are you, without any confused intermingling of entities. I have myself to have you, or the other way round, it makes no big difference. Apart from the sheer coincidence of my being a man and you a woman, it is your being a woman that makes me into a man. For otherwise that name makes no sense to me – a man – just as my parentally and socially acquired name doesn’t.It is hard to describe my love for her, given that the very existence of my I, as I have come to see it now, is laced through and through with the fact of her existence – discrete, alive and wonderful. To her I may say, with justice, ‘You are the eternal YOU of my life, to whom my existence shall always be referred.’ At least that is how I feel now.This problem of now and forever has bothered me since a long time. Why is it, I have often asked myself in wonder, that the now always insists on being taken for forever? A deceptive permanence, that it always yearns to wear? What is it that bothers the now and makes it strive to reach such a pitch as to overwhelm the heart and make it start thinking of forever? It is always this now that recurs, at irregular intervals of time, and thus, in a sense, does manage to acquire the colours of permanence. But what about forever, then? Is there no forever?There must be some sociological sense to all this. Women always seem to find it so easy to say ‘always’ (it seems so easily to roll off their tongues), while a man’s always is always in doubt. Why is this so, or, at least, why has this been so till now? And also, does it work out, over time, in terms of the claims for forever? If I claim forever for my now, will I actually be able – do I really have the power and the privilege – to make a forever out of my now? Les abstractly, is my present feeling, and more to the point, the force of my present feeling, likely to last a long time? Will it always be the same, or will it, even, ever be the same again?The one eternal torment of lovers, the one persistent nagging doubt: will I always love/ be loved? As intensely? With a single leap of imagination they reach back into the past – it should remain as it always has been (always has been?!) – and with that same leap they wish to reach far into the future. There is an unspoken resistance to the very idea of change, for we are not used to asociating love and change. ‘By touching you may kill; by keeping away you may poses.’ That is too cruel a statement. But we have taken it to heart. Not by not touching at all, but by letting in fresh air between each touch of the skins, and thus ceaselesly renewing the touch. Isn’t this a sort of permanence, I ask you, isn’t this fairly our always and forever, this beaded string of endles now’s worn like a pearl necklace, or bracelet, or anklets, or like a band around each arm, or the waist? Not keep away (for who would wish to poses and have when one only has to be to let the other be), but forever keep coming back to each other, that is the returning movement of our affections.The fact remains that we are not yet married, and the yet is quite superfluous in that statement. And the story of the permanence of our arrangement, or engagement, might be a different one, written by her hand. What would she write, I wonder. Would she say, for example, that we have sworn to permanently remain engaged, and not that we are permanently engaged to be married? Would she speculate over eternity and the instant? Would she marvel at my I as I have marvelled at her you? Would she say that we are quite happy not to be married? Why aren’t we married? Why don’t you marry, is a question simple and exasperating in the extreme, and one that we have to face all the time. If you love each other so much… The cemented connectivities of swallowed thought are hard to break into. And then, of course, we don’t have a precise answer, do we? Why shouldn’t we marry, yet why should we engage?The spectre of violence haunts me, and it also threatens any kind of permanence at all, whether that of a socially and legally sanctioned agreement, or an emotionally scripted one. The torrid turbulence of the times literally takes my breath away at times. It appears as if we exist as embryos of human beings that we can never be, inside the medium of violence in a not shatter-proof glas jar. We twist and turn, we perform our little somersaults, but always inside the medium, and only manage to generate the more virulent tides and eddies for all our endeavours. And yet there is love – but where is love, in all our apparatus? A small pipette, filter-paper, test-tube, or metal gauze? Or a large beaker containing the embryonic jar of glas? Or only a very slight, almost minimal, impurity in the chemical composition of the medium? Where does it come from, what place does it have in all the nonsensical violence of our existence? In the quiet night as our charged bodies warm and rub against each other, these outlandish thoughts surreptitiously enter my head and make me love her with yet greater tendernes and desperation. As my flesh sweats and moves above her, or beside her, or below her, and it hurts me to feel all our love for each other, in all our respective strangenes and mystery (who am ‘I’ to love her anyway, who is this beside me, a living entity, a body with life, a mind, with eyes and lips that open and shut?), I feel the permanence, too, a different kind, of this large and great moment, of the fullnes of my incomprehension, or half-comprehension.Now is the right time to think about timelesnes, the extreme vulnerability of the instant makes it big enough for all our lives, and just as inevitably as on the axle of destruction, we swivel about also on the fingertips of love. Allow me, therefore, my well-well-beloved, the ineffable honour of asking for your hand, in love. © Varnan Niazbo

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