Musings on life and how I choose to interpret it…

[Writer's Note: I haven't decided yet if this is just a piece in itself, or a harbinger of bigger worlds to come. I would hope I can get a better sense of that from the feedback it receives. It's quite lengthy, for a chapter, so I'll be especially grateful to any patient soul who can trudge (or glide!) through the meandering paragraphs and offer words about its readability and improvements that it will inevitably deserve.]

He comes in quite late these days. There’s the shuffling of keys, the occasional, quiet cursing, and the eventual sigh at the prolonged tediousness of the exercise. Finally. The heavy door opens begrudgingly as a hand appears from the widening crack and gropes instinctively about the wall. The lights are dim, some bulbs have even shorted out. The enveloping fluorescence reveals a crowded, haggard sprawl of notes, empty cups and saucers; clothes strewn on the floor, and a thin coat of dust that gets reshuffled every time he enters and leaves. The chair beside his desk has seen the best of its days, and the impatient touch of duct tape around its joints at the seat and a foot are starting to unravel. He’s been meaning to chuck that ancient, unsteady chair for a while now; but every time he sits on it, the contours of the rexine depress comfortably around his bottom, and the particular bent of the chair when he leans back suspends him at just the right angle between thought and determination, reverie and depression, sleep and anxiety, slip and oblivion.

He removes his shoes beside the door, puts the socks inside them, undresses to his underwear, and relieves himself in the tight space of his corner bathroom. He flushes every other instance. Tonight he doesn’t. The slack, moist towel should have been put in the washer a long time ago, but it persists in its state: removing and collecting a day’s worth of sweat, stain and burgeoning unaccomplishments.

He doesn’t talk to himself as much as he used to. There was a time when he was more open; when he had the bright, expectant eyes of anyone who is young and idealistic with nary a brooding cloud over his head. His eyes are still bright and sharp, but they are now edged with a restlessness of a mind trapped inside a body going nowhere. The forlorn hunch in his wide shoulders betray a swell of self-loathing meet machismo. His hair is unkempt, unwashed for an unacceptably long interval, and there are bright specks of dandruff on his dark shirt.

He sits on that rickety chair, pulls himself closer to his desk and rests his face on his hands. This is one of his nightly routines. Sometimes he paces briefly across the room before falling on to his bed on his back and falling further into sleep. Then there are those days when he staggers into the room, with a shit-eating grin on his face, finds his way into the bathroom, relieves himself and then some. But tonight he just sits beside his desk. His coffee mug is empty — has been for a few days. His change jar is down to its last remaining nickels and cents, and that also explains why the clothes have that musky smell of neglect and unhygienic disposition. It’s not that he doesn’t care; the guy just can’t afford it.

The notes and books on his desk and on the shelf on the corner across from it reveal a once curious lark slowly groped by the withering roots of cynicism. There’s a thick coffee table book filled with images taken by the Hubble Space telescope. Another one about prehistoric marine creatures. There’s one about the ice age given to him by his uncle when he was a wee little tyke, which he meant to finish but ultimately found too boring — fossils on rocks are one thing, things about rocks another. There are a few books about Russian and Middle-Eastern history, some eastern philosophy fluff, a Tibetan book on dying, and a plethora of collections on the state of world affairs. There are novels as well, a whole shelf full of them.

The haphazard assortment of notes on his table cover a wide range of topics written between instances of fitful enthusiasm and indignant spiels — the case of a washed up, insecure intellect [i]aspirateur[/i] dried up on ambition and drunk on high-minded, onerous discursion. There are a plenty of short stories: none of them completed, some barely past the first paragraph — the rising, caffeine-fueled rhetoric more often than not limp away by due course of substance-abuse towards a grinding loss of words. He prefers to type his words out most of the times. He almost always has his laptop with him when he leaves. Tonight it sits in the middle of the desk: closed shut, powered on but sleeping. He opens the computer, moves his finger on the touch pad and the CPU whirs itself to operational mode. He stands up to retrieve the trousers he undressed from today. The wrinkled, beige coloured khaki pants are frayed at the bottom and grimed by the low, tired shuffle of a man going through the motions of a day without realizing how the ritual began in the first place. He fishes around in the pockets until he finds a card, a business card, and sits back beside the desk. The card lies on the corner of the desk, burning dimly under the tiredly scrutinizing stare of his. The computer is now fully awake and prompts his login password. The welcome music resonates just barely above silence from the tiny speakers of the laptop, but even that is enough to irritate him as he quickly presses the “mute” button.

Here is the devolution of a person to the whims of the internet: the usual haunts at Youtube, Facebook, newsmagazines and sports websites that take anywhere from between five minutes to the early morning of next day. His email inbox is somberly empty, devoid of any meaningful correspondence for the past week or so. Like a surly subway operator caught in a sonorous funk on a particularly slow weekday afternoon, he listlessly jumps from one blog post to another, occasionally offering his unattached commentary on things that interest him: mid-east politics, NBA games, movie reviews, poker strategies, science journals… among many others. There are those nights when he places the kleenex box on the side and prepares to placate his whimpering horndog. Towards the end, when the persistent ache on his back reminds him (implores him) to get some sleep, he pushes himself away from the desk, cancels all the windows and turns the light and his zeitgeist device off. He hasn’t written any words to add to his young, faltering oeuvre.

His weighted face now tilts around as he snaps his neck and cracks his joints on his shoulders and fingers. He lies on his bed, rigid for a brief moment before finally exhaling and settling: the steady accumulation of swirling debris and unchecked floodwater temporarily relieved by the onset of a tried and true loss of oversight. The kind that nips at a greedy contractor’s heels, one who chooses to look beyond the compromised structural integrity of a building’s frame after every shot of an expensive rum procured from his tacit maneuvering. Until he feels the undulating motions at the very top, whipped around by an autumn breeze and timorous recourses. This too will pass, he thinks unconvincingly.

Our man sleeps facing towards the cluttered desk, the head of which lies on the right side of the desk, about a foot apart. Except he’s not sleeping. Not yet. Usually it takes between five or eight minutes for him to loll off, to momentarily escape the glacial slide of his non-progression, and to wake up to another day of abject contrivances and wasted hours. But it has already been more than ten minutes now, and he lies uncomfortably still as a corpse on his side staring with mute insistence at the business card on the corner of the desk towards him. He turns away finally, fitfully, but he still cannot manage to doze off. Or even close his eyes for that matter. He grabs the blanket towards his chest forcefully, realizes so, and relaxes his grip a little. The ticking of the wall clock across the room from him now becomes the focus of his irritation. He hoists himself up and rests his back on the headboard, bringing his knees towards him. He surveys the visible floor around him, dimly lit by the streetlights from outside. Like an inattentive farmer surveying his farm and silently chastising himself for the pitiful yield before him, he sighs and makes a half-hearted resolve to clean up his room. Some next time.

It is nearly 11 p.m. now, and even though he’s stayed awake far later, tonight he — for some unfathomable reason — wants to sleep a little earlier than usual. He doesn’t need to wake up early the next morning, but he wants to. Inexplicable. But even he has come to terms with the unpredictable swings: the peaks and valleys of his needs and resolutions.

The card still remains, persists, on the periphery of his thoughts and visions.

He snatches the card instantly, surprising himself a little with his brash vigour. It is a quaint piece printed in a floral, handwritten script with a delicate dab of olive ink on a paper colour resembling a Nepali rice paper. Printed on the upper-left corner is one “organic tea connoisseur” with the name of “Lan Huong” in bold above it. On the bottom portion she’d listed the address and phone and the email of her place of work, an up-and-coming spot called “T & Leaves”, which is centered and printed most prominently of all. On the back of the card is a phone number written specifically by her, for him. He fiddles with it for a while before getting out of the bed and grabbing his wireless phone. He’s back on his bed now, and he stares alternately between the digits on the back of the card and the dial pad before him.

It was at a farmer’s market where he’d come upon her table. The soft sounds of people milling around the park where it was held began to pick its volume a little as the day was closing to an end, and some of the farmers and merchants had started to pack up. Lan Huong had her table at a spot underneath the generous shade of an old oak tree beside the entrance of the market. He had noticed her before, on a couple of occasions, and this was the first time he’d seen her behind a table of her own. The table — a long, rectangular folding type — consisted of bowls with tea bags and packets of sugar, a pile of paper cups, an electronic thermos with hot water, different types of milk, and some stacks of brochures and business cards. He was on his way out and as he glanced at Huong’s table, she smiled back at him.

He’d sauntered over towards her, said hello and remained mesmerized for the rest of the conversation at the way her dark, breezy, medium shag hairdo danced above her shoulders as she displayed an impressive array of vigorous nods and laughters with head thrown back; the upper body angled ever which way to enunciate a certain point. She was wearing a white, cotton dress top, with a puffed set of short sleeves and a knot at the back. Her neck was bare. The low hip, denim trousers looked genuinely worn at the knees, and it was complemented well with a pair of brown leather sandals. Her face was noticeably angular: thin at the chin with high cheekbones and a dot of a mole just under the lip on the right side. She had a smiling set of eyes, brown and bright. Somehow they got talking for far longer than he’d anticipated, and, by virtue of his curiosity which was fortunately dry at the well and wanting of all things concerned with organic, caffeine and South East Asia; they’d managed to have an invigorating conversation. He’d never been to Asia, but knew enough of it to ask meaningful questions and thoughtful rejoinders.

From their brief talk, he’d gathered that she had come over to Vancouver, Canada when she was three years old. Her parents were from the coastal town of Danang, Vietnam, and she had been entrusted under the care of her maternal aunt for fifteen years. Then she studied at the University of Toronto, botched a degree in International Studies in her second year, became disillusioned with the whole “education establishment”, traveled further east to Nova Scotia where she picked grapes at a winery for two summers and then found herself back in Toronto, where she was most recently hooked up as a tea barista for this store that she was tabling for on this day. She’d been to Vietnam and the region of S.E.A a couple of times between her trips around Canada. It was there that she was hooked on to tea, among other things, and the various intricacies, forms and the rituals around it. It was there where she met Karen Doolittle, fellow tea connoisseur and mint-fresh owner of “T & Leaves”, and it was here where she was working on her third day of employment.

He listened attentively, all the while faintly sensing a growing surge of perturbation in his chest and lower. He helped her pack up, during when Karen pulled up with her minivan and they loaded the stock together. He said goodbye to both of them, and had just turned his back to leave when Lan called to say thanks and handed him her card. He said he didn’t need one, because he was being his oblivious, aloof self; but she’d insisted. It was during his walk home when it hit him that she might possibly fancy him. Rubbish, he thought, and dismissed the possibility away like a gnat hovering around his reading space. By the time he’d gotten to his apartment, he convinced himself that he needed to sleep early, get a good night’s rest, and wake at a proper hour for once.

And now he remains on his bed, unable to sleep, and unable to make his mind up about the phone number before him. I should sleep on it, he sympathizes to himself, and shakes his head in an all-knowing, been-there-done-that, once-bitten-twice-shy lament that he thinks only people like him are capable of understanding.

The card stays on his right hand, the phone on the other. He becomes aware that his heartbeats are now positively throbbing underneath his chest, as if caught up in the excitement of the rising crescendo, the moment of truth: crunch time.

“Hello?” She sounds puzzled, wondering who could possibly call her up at this hour of the night.

He hesitates for a moment, suddenly aware that it hasn’t even been a day and he’s already calling her up. At this hour of the night.

“Hey, it’s Zuhair,” he says in a relaxed way, feigned and with effort, of course. “We met at the market earlier today.”

“Ohh, hi Zuhair! How are you?” she says. He imagines her on the other end full of brightly lit eyes and expressive lips. Possibly holding a cup of hot and steeped green tea. Was there a trace of hesitance in her greeting? He can’t tell.

They exchange pleasantries and then it hits Zuhair, he of the bold hell-may-come, caution-to-the-wind explorer, that he doesn’t really have a point to this call. Realization sinks in like to a Looney Tunes character staring haplessly at the TV screen after having walked off a cliff and suspended in mid-air.

“I was…just wondering,” he probes nervously, “if we could meet up sometime. It was great talking to you about all that history and traditions behind tea… drinking. And I’d love to hear more about ‘Nam and everything.”

Mostly, he just wants to stare at her again. To be beside that lithe, coy figure and the nice smell of her being. He realizes that she was talking on the other end.

“Sorry?” he cuts her mid-sentence.

“Yeah, yeah. No, I was saying I’d love to hear more about what you’re writing too. Absolutely. When d’ya wanna meet up?”

He didn’t expect this to be so linear in progression. He had dreaded all kinds of dead-ends, confusion, awkward farewells and frustrations, but this was something else.

They decide on a time and place around Lan’s off-day. He jokes that he was off almost everyday, because he was a struggling writer (like he fancies himself) and a creative writing student, ha ha, and also inquires if they would be drinking tea at some cafe. Lan laughs heartily. Such a jokester, this guy Zuhair.

He is now on his back with a pillow under his head. He stares at the ceiling, content and mildly excited. The excitement ebbs gradually, like that of a little child slowly dozing off from her sugar high, and gives way to a content exhaustion in its wake. He can still faintly recollect the whiff of her hair. He imagines how her handset must smell like. He imagines her bedroom now, neatly arranged with the scent of an exotic incense or cluttered with all kinds of environmental paraphernalia. He imagines her some more. He’s starting to drift off now, our hero Zuhair Khan, tired and excited as he is. His eyelids blink non-reflexively, and soon slide into a permanent close. He’s sailed away now, for the time being; far from the smelly, gut wrenching details of life that need to be attended to. Far and away from the ominous storm that looms ahead, full of spite and menace. Our clueless, aspiring intellect has a change in season to look ahead to, and rest billows inside his body in a blissfully unassuming grace. Routine gives in to sleep. Finally.