SOMETHING ABOUT THE THING..

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….”