Reflections After a Trip to a Seaside Cafe

By Yaschen Dlima

The sound of my voice. It's heavy. And I am angry. I am annoyed. I am pissed off. And I am saying the same thing over and over again. I may not be saying it, but I am thinking about it and it is painful. Painful. Pain. Where is it? I can’t see it. And I can’t exactly feel it. But I know something is happening. And I don’t know what it is. Why don’t I ask Mister Jones? Am I mister Jones. I am annoyed once again. Every little sound pisses me off. I don't want to get away from these things, but I would like them to be silent. Shut up somewhere in their stomachs. Their voices dimmed. Far away from my ears. Because I already hear too much. And it is not sound. It is unhappiness. Discontent. Inability. What strong words I utter. And I cannot do anything. I can sit as I am. On my bed. Why do I want to say that I am sitting in bed. Is it because I have nothing else to say? Or maybe it's because I cannot speak about what I want to say. I do not know. But I sense the unease creeping inside me. I hate the uneasiness of it. I hate it. My mother once told me to not hate something. She said that hate is too strong a word. And that you don’t really mean it when you say it. But I hate this. I truly hate it. Why do I hate this? I keep wondering. I keep looking for reasons. Everything is logical, rational. Fit neatly inside a framework capable of being understood, for to understand, as far as I see it, means to digest the morsel completely. What is understood cannot be regurgitated, unless, of course, one chooses to be inconsistent. Adopt a new set of rules. A logic covered in blue syrup. Ah that’s what it is. A regurgitation. I'm throwing up my worries. But they keep falling back into me. Into my mood. Into the muscles and organs shifting underneath my skin. These toxins. Poisonous. Was I made to tolerate such pain? Is it even pain? I am a body. And I feel this thing creeping inside me. Spreading its fingers like tendrils outward to the corners of the material that saturates my being. I'm using such abstract words. But they symbolize a real entity. An entity of experience. I am experienced. Flowing. Dynamism. A prison. Why do I crave stability? Presence? Groundedness? Words I wasn’t created to withstand. They seem to flee my being. My being. A learned object. I am a being. Is there any truth in this? Or am I just taking it all for granted. Believing what I’ve been told. But nobody tells me anything. They all talk. And they like talking. Am I talking? Is this me talking like a person? I want something. That is why I started writing this down. This. A word that references an entirety. Itself. A self referential symbol. A button. A trigger. Meaning inside a wound. That’s odd. A wound.

I see a word as a wound. I'm talking about words when I want to talk about myself. But these words, ‘myself’; what do they even mean? Should I stand in front of a mirror and point to the figure inside and say out loud, “That is me”. That. Me. It's the same thing again. Something is happening here. And I don’t know what it is. A multicolored lamp squats on a white granite platform running along the edge of my room beneath the big sliding windows I sometimes dare to look out of. My bedroom. The bed on which I sit and experience this absence of everything known to mankind is inside a bedroom. A bedroom in the sky. Hanging above the ground. Looking at nothing. It is a bedroom. And bedrooms cannot see. They can only contain. Am I the figure, the object, the being being contained? I would have to be a being. And I come back to the same questions again. I remember an evening. It was evening. And I was among people. These people, or so they called themselves, seemed to move their lips and limbs and the muscles so naturally. So gracefully. I thought them untouched by this absence containing me. They talked and looked at each other with a powerful interest on the subject being talked about. They seemed so serious about it. I could only marvel at what I was looking at. I felt at peace listening to the sounds they muttered. I swallowed their movements, so eager and bold, their expressions, innocent, serious, true to themselves, at least in that moment. I looked at their faces and the way their bodies curled into positions permitted by the chairs on which they sat. I watched them look at each other with tenderness in their eyes that dripped onto their lips and cheekbones. Their faces are blooming like flowers on a creeper. The flowers I stop to stare at in the garden which the large windows of my bedroom overlook. And sometimes they smile. And the world becomes cheerful. Everything blissful. Beautiful. Even the ugliness. Not forgotten. But transformed. By a smile. And I felt not too deep inside me, a pleasant release. I was sitting on a chair in front of a short round table at a cafe near the ocean. Before the evening grew darker and my mood more sullen, I looked at the sunlight, fresh and youthful, seeping in through the tiny spaces between the leaves of a creeper stringing a green mesh which formed one of the walls of the cafe. The sunlight, and I call it sunlight because it was a light like no other, it was free and beyond the control of man, of people contained in bedrooms and cafes. It did what it was meant to do. Shed light wherever it could. It needn’t the permission of anything that presumed it held the power to give permission. And so I watched this sunlight warm the red wall that lay to the side of me. It brightened its cool red texture. The light interfered in what the wall thought it would be. A red wall. But it wasn’t a red wall anymore. A golden quadrilateral now slept soundly on its flatness, transforming the red into something not quite red. The wall didn’t ask for this intrusion. But it intruded anyway. Such is sunlight. Two women sitting on cushioned straw chairs on either side of a wooden table seemed to talk forever. Pauses interspersing their meandering dialogue were spent sipping on iced lattes that sat on the wooden table in front of them. Water droplets running down the length of the glass reminded me of the warmth inside, the unrelenting Bombay heat persisting within that cool breezy February evening. I thought of nothing that evening. I simply wanted to get away from what I was so used to seeing. All that is familiar, all that traps me. I wished to experience something unfamiliar. And so I drove far away from home, to the seaside, and sat in a cafe amongst people. I tell you once again I felt at ease. I find no purpose in continuing this speech. I shall end it right here. But a voice says to me that end is too strong a word. Why don’t you pause instead. For pausing means that I can go on. This voice wants to go on. Or does it want me to go on? I do not know. Well maybe, I should pause right here.

By Yaschen Dlima