The Girl Who Was Afraid of Waves

The Pedantic

I turned off the lights and closed the door behind me. It was a first for tonight, leaving the solace of my room to take a quick puff and buy some juice for myself. The night has succumbed to the frivolities of the streets – people drinking to their hearts content as they poured their guts out to women who were more interested in the thickness of their leather wallets rather than the proclivities the men were fantasizing about; the rushing cars and roaring buses that came from everywhere; the neon lights whose hieroglyphics would have been a wonder for scholastic ponderance a mile over.

      I walked down the dimly lit flight of stairs, wondering where my feet would lead me tonight, other than those streets that welcomed lost souls for the remainder of twilight, and yet were too vicious, nay, too vicarious to even care about what would happen to everyone else who dared to cross her paths.

      I trotted the tiled streets, past the sumptuous aroma of steamed everything, trying to focus on the task of the night – to grab a mug of juice and do a few Malboros. I paid the man his worth of rose essence and led myself through the stations upon stations of succulence, asking myself whether it was right or insane to actually feed myself at this time of day. I would eventually accept the night's challenge for a meal, after I have satisfied myself of the sights and sounds of the streets that ate many who have lost their way and found themselves at the fork on the road that led to one lesser evil after another. I thought for a while and asked myself whether I was to meet the same fate. I shrugged and could not care less.

      It took me less than a minute to work my way through the ill-fated, red-cheeked men and women who lined up the al fresco of my side of the street. The smell of beer, puke and overly-sprayed parfum violated my nostrils but I took little regard. I was not part of these streets to begin with; I was merely passing by.

    I lit my first stick and looked around while I took sips of rose essence. From the faint shadows that sat on the makeshift meadow that greeted the massive public transport system that scoured this entire island, I saw people – dark people. They were talking in a foreign tongue - too foreign for another foreigner to actually make sense – and yet it all made perfect sense to me. People pass me by, singing tunes they knew by heart, while some played electronic games on their devices that broke them even further from the society that they were once part of but now has reduced them to mere consumers of digitized information that in the first place doesn't matter nor signify any palpable co-insurance to be regarded as a tangent existence.

     They sat there by three's and four's, laughing heartily, naming places that were as new to me and yet felt familiar and homey at the same time. I felt drawn into the conversation that sounded too ancient, and yet at a point, the green and red neon lights made more sense to me than their gab.

     I stood there, amazed by how disdain disconnected and yet startlingly affined to everything that I saw – the neon lights, the seated shadows, the noise, the street, the lack of connection of them all to each other and the surprising relation they still fostered amongst all the chaos. Beautiful chaos.

       Rooted to the poor excuse for earth that I stood on, resembling more of a sandpit than actual muddy ground, I took a 360 perspective of the details that unfolded before me: women scantily clad in bright hues that were scientifically proven to attracted babies because of their effects on their impressionistic brains; men drunk or cheeky or both, sitting beside and across women who couldn't care less but had to stay anyway; table cleaners who spent an eternity of the whole day taking about everyone else's rubbish but forgetting that they too had their own to clear up back home; the men and women who alight from public transport, from private vehicles, from their lives just for the night; the giant red lips and the sorry excuse for a champagne saucer that looked more like a goblet; the vindictive eyes that stared at me for a nanosecond, asking themselves why I had a perplexed look on my face.

       I jeered at myself and took a few deep puffs on my Malboro and started my way back to the house, passing by the same men, the same putrid scents that violated and yet calmed the soul, the same neon lights that flickered endlessly when you closed your eyes, the same stares that seemed as perplexed as mine. I did not dare look back, lest I intended to be drawn into their invitation. I was not in any accordance to entertain the thought.

        Climbing up the stairs have proven as herculean as it was climbing down. The steep incline was a veritable justification for the solace they held at the top of the flight. One by one, I took my steps, counting on not plunging into an immensely humiliating doom of slipping and then bumping my cranium unto every last ghastly step that reminded me of old houses, old memories, old people I knew, loved and missed. It was painstaking to even dare to take the steps, but solace was not offered downstairs. It was high above the third storey; I had no choice but to comply.

        I closed the door behind me and slid back into the respite of the room I called sanctuary from the bustle of the night's fangs and pangs. I took my last few sips of the rose essence I bought for a dollar something, and started gobbling up the rice meal I paid to the lady who spoke little but understandable English, compared to that other lady I once bought soya milk from, whom after minutes of misunderstanding each other, ended the conversation with a blunt remark of myself being foreign, which equated to being misunderstood most of the time.

        The cold air in my recluse calmed me as I started to pen my thoughts. It was midnight, and the pedantic in me took over yet again.