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2002-05-20 - 3:30 a.m. 1) Morning Glory Midnight for him was 12 PM. He loved waking early on Sundays before her, and sometimes when she stirred from sleep she would see him sitting facing the window, in anticipation, with his hands on his knees, just like a child waiting for the commercials to end and his favourite cartoon to come on. He noticed her looking at him once, and broke into a smile that told her: 'There is no mystery, no mystery at all.' After that strange genuflection to a sky unveiling its colours (how much could he notice the subtle gradations from one hue to another?), he would take off for his morning jog, and return, flushed, to the coffee she had made for him, to her toothpaste-tinged lips and peach-smelling neck. He kissed, with exceptional tenderness, the parts of her skin that were latticed by a stray rumple in the sheets, those rose-prints on a wedding card. However, as the day wore on, she noticed the withering before her eyes; he was getting irritable, solemn, lethargic. The light, now harsh and matronly, was busily uncovering every item in the house, exposing grains in wood panels, stains on the wall, a riot of dust-motes at the base of disturbed curtains. What he was seeing all around him were facts, bare, unchangeable, cast in stone by an unremitting sun, and she knew how intolerable it must be for a man who had only recently sought truth in a panorama adorned with shifting chiaroscuro clouds. She blamed herself sometimes; how she wished she could resist succumbing to the afternoon's corruption, that at least some fragrance of the enchanted morning could remain preserved within her. But she knew how hopeless it was. Her hair was disheveled, her soles sticky, and on the back of her grey T-shirt (because she avoided him, could not bring herself to face him) was a dark patch of sweat, like a bull's-eye of failure. 2) Cactus She tried. She listened to her friend's advice, and refused to initiate any phone calls to him. For one whole week she suffered from the torment of speculations: did something bad happen to him, was he really busy doing his army work, was the relationship just not meant to last? Her anger also met its double: she was furious at his indifference, and equally furious that his indifference (a low-maintenance activity) was matched on her side by rage (an activity, admittedly, which was an orchestration of teeth-gnashing, neurotic email-checking and irrational excitement at SMS beeps). One day, his call arrived, like something a wave would carelessly wash onto the shore, and her relief erased the artful composure she had contrived to present to him. She was incapable of being cold, or affecting offense; as a matter of fact she sounded stupidly happy, unable to parry his innocent question of 'where are you at now?' with an aggrieved 'where were you all this time?' When they went out that night he never saw the need to fill her in on what had transpired in his absence, and with a wistful smile she wondered if that was because she had always been present in his mind, despite their lack of contact. There were bits of her, she theorised, which he pilfered and stored in reserve to last him through the nights. As they kissed later, she opened her eyes and watched him. She worried about the quantity of the rations she was offering him this time, and when he would be thirsty for her again. He looked blissful, gulping her down, inhaling her, her taste infusing his veins, and when he finally opened his eyes to meet hers, she saw how satiated he was, how this prophesied at least two weeks of drought for her in the days ahead. 3) Lotus He was cryptic, he never seemed to speak in straight sentences, and there was a phase when he would have conversations with her in Zen koans. Once, when watching laundry flapping on a pole, he asked her whether it was the wind or the blouse that was moving, and finally revealed, triumphantly, that it was her mind that was moving. And there were more anecdotes, about the acolyte who had his finger chopped off, the cat that was broken into half, and the monk who carried a woman across the river. All this amused her sometimes, but being the confirmed atheist she was (a conclusion reached at the age of eight at the death of her hamsters), she had difficulties with all things spiritual. For her Samsara is a pub, Dharma has a husband called Greg, and Nirvana was a band whose frontman, if one would follow the logic of reincarnation, would probably be born as something nasty (cockroach! lizard! proboscis monkey!) since he pulled the gun trigger into his mouth. On the last night they were together, he told her about the flower sermon, about how Buddha plucked a lotus from a pond and held it in his hands, without uttering a word. And then he started quizzing her on what she thought it meant, whether she agreed with the scholars who said that the lotus represented the Three Worlds, or those who claimed it was a reversal of the sacred mantra 'ohm mane padme ohm', or 'the jewel is in the lotus' (the lotus was now in the Buddha, the jewel). Her mind could only stray: there were boys who bought flowers for their girls, men who bought jewels for their women. She wasn't one of those girls or women, and she didn't mind it, but she didn't know what to make of someone who offered her both, trapped in a riddle. He was the lotus, with its breakable stem and subtle petals; she had plucked him out of some deep pond, and here she was, standing as a kind of symbol she couldn't decipher and understand. When she said goodbye she did it with the grace of one who was enlightened.
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