New Life..

You could prick her with a needle and she would just sit there staring at the wall as if something would suddenly leap out of it. She was not sure what had led her to this. If only there was something she could put her finger on to be the reason for her to feel numb, if there was anything to it at all, it was routine. The same old set of motions to be performed at the same old time of the day...

Rushing back to her workstation after she queasily finished the chores, to log back into ‘New Life’*, she would watch and marvel at the pixellated caricature of Poseidon, creating tiny craters in the plasma while running her fingers over him on the TFT, breathing heavily as he moved across the room towards her, lousy, flickering animation notwithstanding.

She had waited long for that rush in her head, making her delirious with anticipation of being touched, shaken with that long forgotten pleasure wave. The large gaping hole between the virtual and the real had long been filled up with the ever piling laundry and unkempt dishes in her kitchen sink. It had not taken them long to find each other in this virtual world and it felt they belonged, even though they had promised never to let the veil of pixels reveal their real selves…

Out there she was a young, blonde, vivacious, polka-dotted Barbie with a magnetic smile to melt many a hearts. Out there she could be anyone she wanted to be, someone she used to be. It was her never land, it was her new life...

A gracious tall Texan, still some years away from resorting to hipsters to cloak the middle aged flab, cognizant of the little twinkles in her eyes that had managed to survive the years of household rituals, anyone could see that she had had a glorious youth. Yes, she still had it, to make a man want rest his head on her bosom and want to talk about his dreams and have his hair caressed by her long slender fingers.

Her confession was hardly a surprise or an earth shattering shock to her husband. And all he was capable of was managing a resigned, dilated look as she packed her bags. They had already run out of recipes to cook themselves any romantic make-up dinners. He wondered at his composure and the unexpected slice of relief along with the expected stabbing pain. He knew the marital mock drills taken their toll and there was not even pretence of promise for her to rejoice. He had work, she had chores. He wanted her to smile again, but knew he had nothing left to make that happen. 'You can always come back', he said, not sure if he really meant the way it came out!

So she set out to find her cozy sunset with nervous yet buoyant strides. She set out to find the never land despite its name. It’s a moment when you just do an ostrich, albeit all the experience and wisdom. A respite from reality and 'what can't be's'…a leap of faith, jumping off from a cliff, hoping against hope, for those few seconds you are suspended in thin air, the rocks will liquefy into a river, before you hit the ground with a thud.

Poseidon was a brawny, hirsute, cow boyish, well-built man, donned in leather jacket and ripped blues. Her mind quickly mapped the pixels to bone and flesh, alphabets to his husky voice and the flickering animated locomotion in the Newlife arena to his long airy strides and she was in love, almost, all over again, despite the oddities.

Poseidon was having a hard time mapping the polka-dot girl to this early middle aged Texan though, in spite of the exchange of statistics over the wire. He was still lost in his fantasy of a petite Barbie enrobed in kilt, who would come running across the lawn, jump into his tight embrace and be lost in his arms. He might not have run his fingers on the screen, but that Newlife Barbie just won't go off his head!

Wishing it to be a mere sheet of ice which will eventually give away, she grew restless in a couple of days sensing the reluctant hugs and embraces as he sat there on the beach, lost in the distant autumn sunset. It pained her to just look at him trying to be polite and affectionate.

She wanted to stand bare for him to see that inside, she was the same bubbly Barbie of New life. She wanted to smile mischievously at him across a dining table and brush his feet with hers. She wanted to get drunk and pillow fight. Wanted to go beach walking on moonlit nights, wanted him to kempt her hair. She wanted everything she had had in her Newlife. But all those colours seemed to have vanished behind a dismal blue screen...

Staring at the crimson sky across the sea, she saw herself walking down that desolate avenue buried under the rusty maple leaves, leading to her manor, having time to listen to them crumble, beneath her own solitary feet, where she used to walk. She wished that autumn would retreat today, hastily, a few weeks earlier and those maple leaves would decompose and vanish. It was going to be a long walk back home….

*Based on a true story about a few characters of the popular online RPG – ‘SecondLife’

Neon Lights

"Why do they even care to ask me everytime. They know I would never go. Maybe they do enjoy my misery. They are one stubborn herd of pretentious people. Bastards..all of them!"

Every last soul had abandoned the office floor. The building stood in the middle of the business hub, amidst the innumerable slick restaurants and bars. The refulgent neon signs on the distant skyline crowned the vivacious young city hangouts that swarmed underneath. Like so many previous nights, she switched off all lights in her vicinity, fixed herself a cappuccino and laid back in her chair and stared at those lights. She jokingly called it a Friday ritual to herself. It had to be a joke!

Even while sitting there, she could see Megan and Abigail enticingly kiss the air as they sashayed on Swanston Street across the Arthur's Lounge. Their carelessness was infectious and they knew how to flaunt it. They seemed so far away from anything that could be called worrisome as if they always had a cushion of air underneath to walk upon. How she wanted to look down upon them as shallow, mindless damsels and dismiss their existence as frivolous. How she wanted to seal their mouths with a packing tape and dump them in a box labelled 'bitches'. But deep down she knew she would give up everything she had known, just to be them.

She had not looked at herself in the mirror since the last 4 years. In the evenings, while taking shower, she would slide open the bathroom door to let the faint lobby bulb sneak through that tiny inch, just enough for her to make out her soap and shampoo. The bathroom mirror still existed to avoid those rare guests getting judgmental of her timid demeanour. After the shower, she would walk into the kitchen, to pick the scratchy steel pan and would look at her inscrutable reflection to straighten her hair. She would pull up the blinds, put on Carpenters, light up a cigarette and would lay against the fluffy cushion on the carpet and look at the shimmering lights of the distant crawling city traffic.

She would lay there for hours feeling the touch of her skin under her palms. She loved that dainty touch and the paleness of her skin under the faint light in the lobby. She would feel her long slender neck and fine shoulder bone with her fingers. Her fingers would freeze right there as she would often feel a lump form in her throat. It would just grow bigger even though she would clench her jaws. The water in the eyes would just swell and trickle down her cheeks. Sometimes, you can never cry enough. She would just collapse on the carpet, bare, sobbing, retreating into a fidgety slumber.

It was well past ten when she pulled her eyes away from those neon lights. She was nauseated at the thought of the two days that lay ahead. The confines of her sundrenched glass-walled apartment, with nowhere to go, to cook for herself, flipping through those same old sick channels, and rubbing those 4 dozen cigarette stubs in the tortoise ash tray. She picked up her handbag and dragged herself out of the office exit on Lonsdale Street. The night was sizzling. Large groups of boys and girls laughing mischievously and screaming their heart out on the pavements as they made their way to the pubs and restaurants. She walked quickly with her head down. It was a twenty minute walk to the South Bank. She managed to find a secluded spot besides the river where she slumped, eased herself out of her shoes, lit a cigarette and put her feet in the water.

It would have been about an hour when she looked up and saw a fleet of sea gulls circle around the observation deck atop 80th floor of Rialto. They looked like fire flies in the violet beams emerging from the rooftop, ascending to the heavens, pushing away the air currents and forming a halo around the tall iron post. It was time, she finally told herself. She had to be somewhere else. She rubbed the cigarette butt against the concrete, stared at the casino lights in the water for one last time. Taking a deep breath, she slid off the concrete step into the gray calm of the river. The water could not make her chilly today. It rose up towards her chin and immersed her fine shoulder bone, her slender neck....... and her charred face. She had always obhored the prickly touch of water against the burnt skin. She was relieved that it would be the last time.......