One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Kejun Zhao

A series of illustrations for the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

audre lorde, from pirouette, the first cities

Spectating.

See it a different way.

Remember reading an essay by Teju Cole in which he writes about how his glasses save him from having to view the world as an impressionistic blur. Hell yeah to glasses of course, but on certain occasions I really don't mind the uncertainties of vision. From a train window, somewhere close to Nagercoil.

Traffique.

Unfold silly (Music: Everyone I know - Grizzly Bear)

Waking

And now I'm just tripping nasty.

Tick talk We must unconsider time, To truly discern how long it has been. For no sense of cadence Has been provisioned by the Persistent ticktocks Or the exacting glint Of your grandfather's cumbersome wrist watch, Latched on to your limber arm, Portly, unmoving, Like I am. Entire seasons have evaporated. Passion condenses and cascades Down our ruffled cheeks like pellucid waterfalls. A riverine impermanence persists. I do not believe in clocks anymore. When, on that phone call, Your invisible voice would tear across all that space, To materialize at my ear, But not before compelling All those miles of separation To dematerialize, Is how I would know it is time.

Dreaming/Night Sky with Leaves Was it you in my dream, last night? An ephemeral reflection, In a mirror I once knew, From a dim lit room, Sheltered in the thick walled memory of, A time we danced to each other? I can only recollect a sliver of white, Something inchoate. Was it a whimper, a laugh, That echoed across my pitchy corridors, Which only permeate the least among lights? Did you whisper to me, A discreet cipher of sorts, A secret I had, perhaps, kept even from myself? Did you chance upon my crossroads at twilight, Meeting rudiments of the people I’ve met, And the people I haven’t, yet? I hope they did not impend, Or vitiate the experience. Could you tell apart the winds that blew, From the anxious breaths we drew, On all those evenings we parted in June? And wasn’t the moonlight Streaming in through the skylight, Borrowed radiance from the streetlight Which Illumined our first kiss? But you could have stayed, And given me a chance, Perhaps, To wake up to you. ‘Cause when I awoke, Like from a fireplace, doused, There only was cinder and smoke.

Hiding

The beginning is uncertain, irrelevant. As you’d put it, the uncertainty that pervades everything is unmitigably horrifying, yet unconditionally liberating too. So, somewhere within this unassuming but all encompassing chaos, we collided and produced a bit of light and I was helplessly swept away by the austere beauty of it all. And all this, while a tumultuous civil war was thriving within me, feeding on the same conflict that was destroying it destroying me.

Back then, I used to blindfold myself for I found the sunlight too illuminating; too surreal to behold for my withering mind. Unwittingly fettering myself inside a tiny igloo within a deep, desolate crevice, I would go to sleep for days on end.

Then in one isolated moment, as the direwolves stopped yodeling and the clouds parted to allow the tiniest glint of light to slip in through the cracks on the surface, I shot to life and quivering with a newfound sense of purpose managed to drag my clunky limbs and crawl up to the surface.

Out there, shimmerydrifting on the glacial shrouds of death, I found you. You were humming the tunes of sea secrets from a far away land I had long forgotten. Sensing the imminent approach of something pernicious, I must have beckoned you in my sleep. But again, the cause effect conundrum leading up to your being there is entirely inconsequential. Only you being there was significant- you waiting. I looked into your eyes and found them gleaming, with a curious kind of wonder alien to me. Assurances of what was real and what was not seemed hardly necessary to these objets d’art. Weary, young men of the Kierkegaardian order, must be easily given to such charms, for I remember inadvertently ending up sticking real close, from that point on, to their whimsical twinklemerry.

You didn’t mind company, you said. We could wander off to absolutely anywhere at all, you instigated, and off we went perched highly on the wings of the affable hoverbird they call Destiny, exchanging salutations with the great ridges of the west, teasing the coy foothills hiding under the lush canopies of the valorous evergreen and making idle conversation with the soothing nocturne breeze.

Slipping past the guards unnoticed, we would make for the old forum like vandals on a high risk sabotage mission. Yet upon reaching the inner circle, we would simply sit down and share stories with the hardwood brethren who stood romancing the antique corinthian maidens of the foursquare. On our way out we would seek counsel on our wile plans for the world from the giant elder reptile who watched over the old forum’s rather ghastly past.

And post our juvenile misadventures when we would be sitting by ourselves, I would look on without your knowing and notice… how you drew out that solitary eye-liner from your tote and did your precious eyes, for they had to appear inconspicuous to the commonfolk, how you would drift off to otherworlds for the shortest nanoseconds, how your lovely little feet eagerly craved to pull themselves up to pirouette and ponder.

Apart from the eyeliner, hidden in your bag remained whole oceans, livid shards of the roaring Arabian sea, wild hibiscus buds and blooms, more invaluable collectibles from the deciduous fair, quaint old summer air, raindrops from a long lost monsoon afternoon and such other trinkets. Unbeknownst to the world around  you’d conceal them stealthily and strap the bag effortlessly on your shoulder and readily take to the breeze, for it was always taking us places.

There was this one time it took us beyond the radiant neon blurs of the steely acropolis we call home, to the ominous nightly sea on the very edge of the southern realm. While we waited at the door for the moon, soaked in saline mist, you kept brooding over how perturbed you felt earlier that day when your pen had resisted weaving its usual magic spells because all your ink wanted to talk about was the tragedies of the old friends you had lost to the plague. During the reverent silences between the retreat of a wave and the emergence of another, your dim lit full moon face and sullen mercury mind would venture out longingly to meet the distant horizon, even as your body remained tethered to mine by the slightest earthly contact. Though I so keenly wanted to embrace your pinecone diety head to keep away those disruptive tides from enroaching your shores, I would hesitantly refrain for I knew for certain that being fragile was the last thing you’d have wanted to be taken for.

And when eventually your pain would subside, lying underneath an ablaze nightly sky you would ridicule my dingy clouds. Pouncing on my dilapidated mushroom heart with those lithe feet you’d claw out all the cluttered despair with your chimerical laughter, and piece the remains back together with the peevish smirk of a poltergeist and proceed to lick your whiskers with elan over a job well done.

And on brighter afternoons by the moor, we would chisel out silhouettes of the prophets and pretenders for fun and leave them unfinished with Michelangelovian unconcern. And on the sky we would paint incomplete portraits and impatient landscapes with the impressionable palette of Monet in vivid Van Gogh-esque exuberance. In the evenings, exhausted by the mirth derived from all our unholy antics, you would sail away to your bed where your dear canines would keep ye company.

Thus slipped away those summer days at the languid pace of the lousiest ripple of the deadest sea. Then one day, along came postcards from the valley of gardens, summoning me there, for word was out that I’ve been found again. When I brought you in on this unfortunate news, you rather impassively checked the minutes hand of your time teller and reported that we had known each other for not more than seventeen minutes. And then you looked away. I fluttered off with the wings of a reverie to the wonderland where they keep memories of all the minutes we’ll never have. That’s when you leaned in and kissed me. In the touch of your lips was implanted the assurance that I won’t ever be lost again.

Thence I got up and packed my haversack. Chanting Dante for courage I tried to convince myself that these disparate roads that we must venture on would inevitably be intertwined forever. Yet, I didn’t have it in me to leave you behind. I turned to the one last trick I had saved up my sleeve from my ingenieur days; an uncharacteristically risky one. So, whilst you were looking away at the crescent dunes of the majestic cold desert wherein you rescued me from, I disapparated into the infinite mystic landscapes contained within your tote and left myself there hiding.

When you finally turned around to look at me, I only grinned sheepishly hoping my eyes didn’t blink to betray. Kissing your starets head goodbye for one last time, I hopped on the wailing eastern wind and embarked on the journey to purgatory and paradiso, whence the summons came. But now, stuck somewhere far away in this land with grim grey skies and a morbid complexion, I’m starting to contemplate the ill fate of my latest trick. For now I realize that amidst all the buzz and bloom prevailing within the vast cosmic expanse of your tote, you might never find me hiding at all. In some drunken haze of an ungodly hour, I was certain this was the only way to remain found, but now it dawns on me that both you and I, could be irrecoverably lost to me. Now, I am forced to think that this must be what endings are all about- the uncertainty. And then somewhere on a thin red line between unmitigated horror and unconditional liberation, everything just snaps.

Freefall to sleep; To the mystical deep, Love. Bathe in a shower Of dreams undiscovered, Swim Away from your shores Of Uncouth cadavers. And I'll wait at the wake, With a raker to snare, You Back to that time you'd Strung Flowers in your hair.

The winter will soon pass. The cracks in your frost, Will give in to the thaw. The surface would break, And disintegrate. But underneath you'd find, The waters still breathing, To make and move mountains.

Some remain shut, Even as the light, unattended, Patiently awaits to be cast, Right outside the door.