The movie hall seemed strangely quiet except for the low buzz inside my head, like the drone of an ancient biplane hidden in the clouds somewhere far above in the sky. I tried to concentrate on the large screen before me. Through the tears, the picture looked blurred and hazy. I didn’t know why I was crying. The biplane was coming closer with each passing second, gradually drowning me in an violent uprising of a now shapeless noise.
I sat erect and immobile, my back pressed against the plush leather seat, my mind sinking into a fathomless quagmire of random thoughts. I could taste Vicky on my still parted lips. My mouth felt dry. I was breathing through it, I realised. I want to close my mouth and then forget about it. I feel all alone huddled in an infant dark. A bluish white lustre hangs like morning fog tracing rows of chairs immediately before me. Silhouettes of the occasionally bobbing heads in them remind me that I am not alone. The familiar smell of a room-freshner colludes at my nose tip to give the stale air a touch of newness – spring flowers, I gather.
Suddenly Vicky turns and looks at me. In the darkness, I can feel his calm, steady eyes bore into my face. Once again I sense that feeling inside of me. The same feeling that I have carried within for as long as I remember. A feeling that I had, unknowingly, reserved for Vicky. I never asked myself what it was or why. I had accepted it unquestioningly. I grip the arm rest of my seat firmly to subdue a shudder that threatens to rack my body. An uncontrollable desire to run outside into the world of light takes over me. My hands are shaking as I tear them off the arm rest to wipe off the beads of perspiration running down my forehead. I feel feverish and weak.
Far from me, stands two exit signs on either side of the growing darkness, glowing eerily like warning signs of the things that wait outside for me. I felt fear etch ominous messages on my heart, which I didn’t know how to read. The massive doors, which let me in, now seemed like invisible prison gates to a dark padded cell without a key in which I was to spend the rest of my life.
I turned to look at Vicky. Without taking his eyes from the screen, he squeezes my arm as if to reassure me. ‘I am beyond reassurance, my dear cousin,’ I tell him, silently. He won’t understand, I know. He comes from a different world than mine. Every year, he visits with his family from beyond that wonderful, magical world I dream of. Seven seas and centuries separate our worlds. People in my world don’t do or say things that you do, Vicky. We don’t even think the things you do. That would be blasphemy. Our desire has made me an outcast already, do you know that?
Darkness is a curse because it gives birth to everything that light refuses to conceive. I have been removed from light so that all that was to be will be. My mind has fought with the inevitability. In horror, I accept it now. Ironically, it wasn’t the light but the dark that made the answers so clear. I now know what people meant when they said I was ’strange.’ I now see the meaning of the look in their eyes. I have hated it. I have hated the light that made them see what they did. Yet was not a part of me waiting for the dark to fall? Was this not the shy child’s unspoken desire? Well, the dark has fallen now, for once and all.
In flashes I see the last two minutes of my life come alive before my eyes. Vicky’s fingers gingerly moving on my thighs; the bursting open of a nameless feeling from the seat of my spine, rising like a pleasurable ache through the muscles of my back into my head, into my eyes, onto my lips; my head titled toward his in the dark, his lips on mine, our tongues promising each other fantasies of the unnamed kind, my body throbbing to discover and deny at the same time; his hands inside my unbuttoned jeans, stroking my adolescent pride, the rising emptiness in the pit of my stomach, my arching hips against the pressure of his soft palm, his lips on mine, interlocked in naked desire, lost in time. I close my eyes tightly in terror against a future that is waiting to happen. I shudder at the thought of stepping outside into the world of light where I will, for the rest of my life, will live as a ‘gay.’
No comments:
Post a Comment