A Player’s Tale

So I found a plane, chartering myself to the farthest reaches of Africa to work with an NGO in a transitory attempt to forget Christine. I was in search of the Heart of Darkness, like Kurtz before me. I longed for the Heavens, to assure me where home could not - high enough to breathe God’s air. I found Him not. In those shapeless hours, everyone was dead to me. Little did I know if I should ever see them again. That idea alone must have driven man wild in the darkness of ages lost – to create an ideal of Heaven, and to rebel against death. For love is the enemy of death, and since death must prevail in the end, in our eternal separation, how could I pay the price of love? I knew then… I so feared the loss of love that I could not allow myself to embody it. I had idealized and romanticized it, yet dreaded living it… for dread of loss. Thus, having lost, I threw myself into the work, to offer some morale to the local community by my presence. I spent most days with refugees, but in the office, my heart fluttered with the weak internet service at every word in Christine’s e-mails, as we corresponded about our summers, continents apart. She was ending her relationship with her college boyfriend, and my heart glimmered at the prospect... In a few weeks I’d return and confess my feelings, and just like in the movies, her heart would open to me. I even bought her a little gold bracelet as proof of my love. Except that I returned jetlagged, sun-fried and gut-wretched. We had time enough for an afternoon date before school began. And that was my moment, sitting near the ocean at sundown, to regurgitate all the months of feelings. But somewhere in my awkward sense of self, my doubt in my looks, some insecurity around girls ever since my first crush went awry, I could only intimate how much I cared for her by handing her the gold bracelet – a futile effort at buying her love. I could not seize her and kiss her as the movie stars do. Even at the school dance that followed, I did not ask her for one… so I watched, impotent, as she worked her hips into the night with a classmate. It was over. They stayed in that position, locked in each other’s arms, throughout the year to come. Thus, there was little irony in my phone call to her on a Monday night, unable to restrain myself any longer. I called her because I did not have the courage to speak the words in person, so I remotely half-coughed the words, I love you. There was silence. And the silence prevailed. The next day was a Tuesday… September the 11th. How rarely we imagine the events that determine our lives. Events we play no part in; yet seal our fates. Barely living through that surreal day, we watched in slow motion as the innocence of our youth ended with the twins evaporating in New York City. It was for the millennial generation what the JFK assassination had been for the Baby Boomers. It was not the Pearl Harbor of our generation, but our Hiroshima, shattering our psyches in a singularity of revelation that could never put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Our horizon was darkening, with the twin promises - endless war and terror in the world to come. I had resigned myself to that future… I woke thereafter with a vague sense of wonder… I was living, or had I died many moons ago, and I existed ever since, with the wool of illusion pulled over my eyes? Did I ever leave the desolate borderlands of Africa, the rugged desert where thousands of refugees lay in wait of abstract futures? Was it real, that night fumbling into the heart of a ghost town, a square, to purchase food and trinkets. Accompanied by three men – one in a business suite, glasses, officially friendly; the other obnoxiously loud, loquacious, the strong man; the third, a quiet little driver, humble, sincere. Indulging on the fresh taste of meat behind a hut called a hotel, we lathered ourselves with each other’s company by the light of the stars. Then it was off to a concrete box of dirt, locked inside the faded blue walls, a rigor mortis bed, a flashlight, a book, no thoughts, a thousand cries for companionship. A man is not poor when he has no wants. Poor is the man who wants but does not have. At least I had the rain. The desert could not say the same. The rain followed me home, where, unable to bear the lack of the voyeur, rubbed by the perpetual burn that we had been closer exchanging e-mails from half a world away, I ended my friendship with Christine, handing her a notice, which told the story of my despair. But I had failed to voice how much I cared, to express how I felt! I was still a coward, embracing my role as ghost, although she was the one who haunted me. We went off to colleges in different corners of the continent. Then, almost two years of pain were obliterated in a gesture, one cool winter’s night when I was home for the holidays. Visiting her pastel bedroom, I took Christine’s hand, and our lips finally found each other, not long enough to recount, but it was enough. The patience, the anguish, the disgust… was worth it! For a single kiss. This must have been the feeling of the Phantom when Christine Daaé finally anointed him in her embrace. Even if it felt like theft to try, and even if nothing more came of it, this could be said… I loved. When Christine lowered her head, was her shame the same as my impure childhood thoughts? Or the guilt of feelings not meant to be shared with a friend? I had known that instinct, having gotten close with Laurie after rejecting Christine from my life. I knew she pined after me from afar during my initial infatuation with Christine; so with an undecided curiosity I allowed an evening our Senior Year to extend to night as Laurie and I made out in the back of my car… how unexpected, she was the first girl I ever kissed! It had not been as I had once envisioned, making out with my dream girl - that advertisement run on repeat in my mind since boyhood. When Laurie moved to masturbate me, I felt humiliation, as though I’d violated the very meaning of friendship. Was that the same feeling that prompted Christine to recoil from my kiss? She looked away, perhaps bowed with shame; that same perturbed animal I had felt when I needed to stop Laurie. Laurie would remain on my pedestal, as friend, and I would remain a virgin, all while desiring the day when I would be wizened and shrunken enough to cheer the cessation of sexual desire; that day I would exclaim, I am free! Like those Nepalese ascetics I once met, who could wrap the dead cartilage of their flapping penises around weights and lift the load to their hips. That was the willpower I wished I had… to be free of Eve’s supposed sin: incarnating into carnality.