Cogito Ergo Sum

Saturday, August 11, 2007

U wakes up at 2.30 p.m. to the familiar heaviness that has settled in her temples, the nape of her neck, the seat of her hips and the back of her legs. It will diminish, she tells herself as she pulls her body out of the bed. She has missed the lunch she was supposed to attend at 2. She's trying to think of a credible excuse but she knows he'll see through it all.

She stares at the lines of her face in the mirror. A little blur and then the transportation back to the very first time. It was just the little distance from his resplendent curls sliding down his teracotta skin to the little holes of his dimples...that was all it took. Oh and how can she forget, the real magic was the sight of his fingers turning the pages of Neruda's poetry fifteen minutes prior to their first lecture in anthropology. And just like that four sweltering summers followed by biting winters interspersed with bronze coloured falls and pirouetting springs swept by...teas brewed to lengthen frank conversation, a little idealism and that delusion of promise in their lives to come.

A shard of pain at the back of her throat brings her back to the fluoride in her mouth. She steps out of her bathroom made fragrant by her tangerine shampoo and whipped cocoa body wash used for her afternoon ablutions when her gaze is distracted to his name flashing on her silent mobile. She looks at it again, a little amazed at how it is incapable of stirring any emotion inside her. He had become a faint silenced memory of three years ago, but still. It felt strange how the effort to respond seemed unwarranted. For a moment, with his name still flashing in the clasp of her hand she ponders. Is this the inevitable fate of mundane love? Or was it just an idea they were toying with? Perhaps, she thinks (a little convinced); perhaps, seven years ago it was just the smoke that Aphrodite blew in her face...