Tears in the Rain

You woke up this morning feeling good and refreshed after a much-needed sleep. The flashbacks involving BF and the sense of humiliation and impotence and rage associated with the years when you were a farmer seemed small and easily managed. You know they will roar back and demand attention. And you know you will handle them the same way: they are nothing but a reflection of your mind’s growing recognition that it is all about money and survival. Of course, your clumsy, impractical disposition towards love has something to do with it. You are getting older with each passing day. Death is grinning at you when you open your eyes in the morning and it follows you every step along the way during the day. It is on your left; it is on your right. Sometimes it even dances right in front of your eyes. So, you try to take care of your health and your looks while trying to regain your money. You are the hunter now. The hunting has been arduous but you feel alive and filled with a mission. Love is no longer a preoccupation because finally you don’t believe in it anymore. You have become crass and cheap and unromantic like so many others whom you have despised in the past. You only care about money and health and survival. You are learning to be taciturn and circumspect, but since you are what you are, you occasionally can’t help but to display your wit, your gift of gab, your instantaneous ripostes and repartees like you told a fellow hunter the other day that while with you there’s a very fine line between genius and insanity, in his case there’s a big divide. You cackled after you said that, all very pleased with yourself. And why not, you have to feel good about yourself, somehow. The world has tried to make you feel small, impotent, and lonely. You know you are not good at the games farmers play. So, you opted for hunting, instead. So far, you are doing all right as long as you don’t get cocky and get shot by an irate fellow hunter. Occasionally, far into the night, when sleep plays hard to get, out of the depths of the immature past, words arrived and you wrote something like the following:


Tears in the Rain

The wind and the rain
The air and the land
One summer evening by the sea,
You and me
Hand in hand
Walking on the sand
We finally met once again
After so many years.
The eyes, the smile, the hair,
They were still there, including the tears.
You asked, “So, have you been good?
Have you been true?”
I said, “As good and true as I knew.
There were many others,
But nobody was like you.
You are like the stars in the sky.
The light of my night,
The fire of my loins,
The love of my life.
I once said I would love you forever.
Forever means ever and ever,
Not even the end of time.
So, what happened?
Did he finally die ?
Or did he leave you for somebody else ass I said he would?
You looked at me and said nothing.
Tears kept coming without end.
Tears in the rain.

Wissai 8/06.

So, Baby, I wrote words like these to ease the pain, to come to terms with the innocent past, to deal with the impossibility. I, of course, no longer love you because you have revealed to me that you are crass, cheap, and unromantic. I no longer harbor the desire to show you the countless poems, some of them in French, I wrote because of you. I no longer wish to ask you for explanations and clarifications. I only want the past to cease tormenting me.