I fall in love every time I write a new story. It is one of my terrible writing habits. And it is one heck of a potent source of power.
Love that is as profit-oriented as that can never be consumed. It has to be a zipless fuck. A fuckless love. Because fucking is too messy. Nowadays, the cost is always too high. The young ones might not understand this, but every fuck costs lots of risks and hail marys. And the older we are, the less risks we want to spend our time on hail-marying.
Yes, grown ups want to fuck too. Very badly. It shows in our gestures and grins and disgustingly intimate conversations. But we can't afford it. We can't afford everything else that comes along the choice to fuck.
Being older meant that we come a baggageful of plans. We did not plan on having these plans; they just sprouted and imposed themselves on us. Every day. For instance, he believes that if he was good enough, God will unite him with his wife, rest her soul, in the afterlife. I believed that if I kept my legs closed, I could write about the experience in a public blog and not suffer through the misery of not posting for another day. That was the plan.
Unfortunately, our plans came with a set of habits. A set of habits that we stuck with. We sure did stick with them. We cursed through every moment that brought such ridiculously fuckless plans and habits. But we did.
***
Like everything else that turns out with plans, this too surprised us. Mostly because we didn't plan on making a habit of being friends for such a long time. Relationships just happen on their own too. You don't get an internet identity because you wanted to end up in a foreign place twelve years later, at the airport asking the only friend left for you in the world (whom you have met as that foresaid internet identity) if he would like to hang out with you for a day.
You do not spend years living in an exotic country because you want to develop an insatiable taste for tomatoes available only in his dusty kitchen, either.
And you definitely did not learn an intellectual language to lose this argument: "I'm a greasy man. Detergent removes grease! What's wrong with you, woman?"
No. Things just happened. That's the way the world works: Plans and habits form whether or not you want to fuck. And every time we do something in the world, planned or incidental, we can only hope that it is going to return to us kindly. We can only hope that we are braced with enough habits to bear through massive tests of character with residues of our identity in tact.
We spent a whole day alone together in the privacy of his home, in our shorts and t-shirts, and separate beds. Through our meals and giggles, we kept our eyes lowered. The subject laid itself on our eyelids so heavily that we only sighed and cut more tomatoes when silence wrung between us for too long.
And besides, we, the older ones, have developed habits so strict that they come to us in crude, undeniable forms. They came to me fully-armored, whispering angrily, from the moment I laid foot in that house until the airport gates closed behind me in the next morning: "Who are you? You don't belong here. Leaveleaveleaveleave..."
***
I feel like I’m breaking new rules every time I write. I promised I would not exploit my private life. I promised I would not divulge on sex. I promised a lot of things to guard my writing voice.
I've broken most of them by the end of this post. Soon I won't have anymore rules left to write with, and I'll need to make up new rules. Or a new habit. I don't know if I should care anymore. Things just happened. Even this post just happened to come on its own - Finally! - after a thousand rewrites.
I fell in love with him every time I rewrote this. I don’t mind that habit. I'm proud of him, and hope he will forgive me eventually for writing about us like this. About the rules we that we broke to test our friendship. And to test the plans that we have duly observed. And the habits that served and protected our identity.
Maybe some of these broken rules have some truth in my writings, and strum words that reverberate with someone’s tune.
