Inspired by true events...
We were at Café Coffee Day on a hot and sultry afternoon,
sipping on some cold coffee with cream and nibbling on some…ahem..ahem..wait
for it…complimentary samosas. Yes, that’s right! I said complimentary! It’s my story, right? I say whatever in the
sweet Lord’s name I want!! A writer’s license, if you may!
“I checked out your blog and it’s empty! What’s with
that?” I asked her, confused.
“Well, yeah,” she replied, apprehensively, carefully
choosing her words. “I’ve had it for quite a while, just that I haven’t found
my thing!”
“Your what??” I coughed viciously, choking
badly on my coffee, the confusion making way to bafflement.
“You know… My thing”
she replied tentatively, not sure how to wipe the dazed and confused look off
my face.
“Your thing?” I asked, puzzled, her reply
not helping with my confusion.
“Yeah, Neil, that’s right! My thing!” She said,
smiling.
Why
the hell is she smiling? Oh God, does she think I understood her thing?
Wait!
Is this some kind of mindfuck!?
“What thing!?” I asked, absolutely as lost
as lost can be!
Wait, let me try and describe how lost I was. Picture
yourself driving down a smooth highway through the desert with a map spread out
in front of you. Now imagine out of nowhere a kangaroo, yeah you heard me, a
fuckin’ kangaroo bounces in front of your car in an apparent suicide attempt,
taking you by utter bafflement. You slam the brakes and swerve sharply
violently to your right to avoid the hapless endangered creature and in the
process, your map flies out of the window. As you realize to your horror what
was happening, you stick you right hand out of the window to try and pluck the
flying piece of paper out of thin air. But again, calamity strikes as your left
wheel goes over a ginormous desert
rock and you fail to control the car at such a speed, inclined at such a fucked
up angle and that too with just one hand, your mind torn between salvaging the
map and saving your ass. But it’s too late and your car swings monstrously to
the right, its momentum carrying further off balance until it does a complete
double somersault and slides forward a few meters before jerking to a halt in a
huge cloud of dust, sand and smoke. But you have no idea what’s going on,
having passed out during the first tumble itself when you head crashed onto the
steering wheel. Now picture yourself waking up in a cabin by the river in the
middle of a thick forest, surrounded by snow-capped mountains with not a soul
in sight and a bandage wrapped around your bruised head. What the fuck, you ask yourself.
Now that’s
how lost I was trying to figure her thing out!
“Oh come on, man!” She said, throwing her arms in
the air in frustration. “Don’t you get it?! I’m talking about my thing!”
Ok,
maybe this wasn’t a mindfuck!
I looked at her, squinting my eyes and scanning her
from head to toe. “Ummmm…. Be a little specific here, sweetie, you’ve got
plenty of things! What goddamn thing are you talking about?”
She glared at me in total disbelief, opening her
mouth to say something but pausing before the words came out, as though unsure
on what to say. “Aahhh…fuck this!” She cried, flailing her arms across her
torso in abject vexation. “Screw my thing, man! There aint no thing!”
I smiled. “Damn straight there ain’t!”
She frowned and shook her head, dejection written
all over her pretty face!
“Hey, don’t worry,” I chuckled and reached across
the coffee table and rubbed her arm. “You don’t really need to have a thing to write. You can write anything
you want!”
“No,” she shook her head again, still not over her
frustration. “I’m looking for some kind of inspiration to write.”
“Inspiration?” I chuckled again. “You can find
inspiration in anything and everything in your daily life.”
“Easy to say!” she retorted.
“Ok, well let me give you this,” I said, trying to
give her some perspective. “Say you wake up in the morning and the moment your
feet touch the ground, you realize that your slippers, which are usually always
there, were missing. Your dazed and confused mind gets thrown off balance and
you scrounge the room looking for your missing slippers. Where the fuck could
they be? And then you spot them on the other side of the bed and you have
absolutely no memory on how they ended up there. And then you gasp in horror as
realization dawns upon you. Do you jaywalk? Do you have amnesia? Shit, do you
have a stalker? What could it be? You don’t have a clue! Are you fucked? Or are
you doomed!? Damn, this is good!!”
“Oh come on, man!” She replied as a smile crept up
at the corner of her lips. “Don’t sensationalize things too much!”
“You see where I am getting with this?” I replied,
grinning wide. “Okay, picture this. Mr. Douchebag comes along and he, in the
words of the great Charlie Harper, is, in every sense of it, an ‘irksome irk’.
He never fails to get your skin crawl, your blood boil and cringe everytime he
approaches within a 10ft radius of wherever you are. You ‘spidey senses’ tingle
and you know he’s somewhere close. You look around and lo and behold, there he
is, to your left, gawking open mouthed at you. Yes, in case you were wondering,
people still say ‘lo and behold’. You
shudder in disgust. But, to your horror, he walks up to you before you could
react and sneak away and says ‘hi’. You are courteous and reply with a polite
‘hi’. He tries chatting you up and even though your replies are monosyllabic,
you just want to run. And in between all those ‘yes, Mr. Douche’s’, ‘no Mr. Douche’s’ and ‘sure, Mr. Douche’s’,
you feel a kind of unease at the pit of your stomach, which gradually climbs up
your chest and onto your neck and you suddenly realize that you’re being
strangled and you cough violently in search of air. You’re in a lot of pain, as
though being stabbed by a million red hot knives in your stomach, in your
chest, from behind and everywhere. All those mental filters are screaming
at you, bellowing at you to get the fuck outta there if you wanna live. And you
run! You could just write that you know!”
I paused momentarily to catch my breath.
And now she
was laughing, raucously and uncontrollably. Guffawing, rather, clutching her
stomach as the laughter takes its toll on her abdominal muscles. “Damn, Neil!”
She said, in between gasps for air, still gripping her stomach and laughing,
tears streaming fiercely down her cheeks, “where do you come up with shit like
this, huh? Do you really have to be so melodramatic?”
“Well,” I smiled, “all I’m trying to say is, don’t go in search of your THING. Let your
THING come to you naturally!!! Once your THING comes, you'll know that your
THING was someTHING that's actually noTHING at all and that it’s just a THING
which has been a thing which you thought was something else!!”
I laughed to myself. Now what the fuck was that. I hope she
doesn’t ask me to say that again coz there ain’t noway in fuck’s name I’m gonna
be able to do that!!
She didn’t. As the
laughter abruptly relinquished her and the smile on her face disappeared, all
she could do was scratch her head and say, “uuuhhhhhhhh….”
