As expected, the Angel Group descended on Cherrie’s neck like ravenous octopuses, rebuffing her for actually admitting to have fallen in love with me and upsetting their initial noble assignment. It was not only unthinkable, but also a timely break from their attention, which shifted from me to Cherrie—and she was slandered more than they had undone me. When her reputation began to be torn to shreds, with assorted hyperbole and nasty insinuations, she wrote an urgent note to the Angels:
‘Dear so-called Good Angels, I can only imagine you sprawling in conquered comfort after the comportments of what you think is another well-dressed scandal, pulling me to pieces in your ridiculous chatty-chatty mouths liberally dripping with the chitchats and silly tittle-tattles which makes me interesting.
‘You are all hypocrites and you know that. I love RS, so what! I adore him! Why should I hide that fact? Why must I run away from myself? I find him irresistible and I confess! Yes, he’s a burden bound round my neck that’s plunging me under to the very bottom but I am madly in love with that dead weight, I cannot live without.
‘You call me a woman bastardised by psychosis? A woman whose cracked IQ has to be reconstructed? But I assure you that I have become a new woman who can no longer be subdued in subways of scandals and shame. I may be crazy but I shall be tainted no longer. I am a new Cherrie and if you can’t make out that distinction between the new Cherrie and the old Chaff, then you don’t know the difference between shit and shinola.
‘This is just me, like it or not, I feel no compunction, I owe none an apology, on the contrary, any remorse or regret I may have felt before, has been vindicated by the crowd mentality into which you knowingly seduced me to fall into. Mine is a cry of victory. Mine is no indecent insinuations. You all are just as vulnerable! You would have done the same thing but just sit uneasily on your BFAs. Don’t imagine I would be buried without a single man ever having seen himself in the whiteness of my breasts.
‘Don’t suppose yourselves superior beings. Just sink your teeth into your haggish carcasses; it’ll stink the same slime pus, a symptom that you are the same as all people on earth. You neither have two a#₤$ nor your livers and spleens function differently from everyone else. Why you turn into moon-hard lunatics when anything involving RS comes up, is crap I won’t pretend to understand. His charisma alone confounds your theories that his ancestors were savage sub-humans living in the trees three centuries ago, when we forced our presence on the African continent. I don’t think his sophistication was cultivated within three hundred years.’
During the short spells when I empathised with Cherrie, I kept discovering like the fool that kept finding out that, the world was actually flat, that on the surface, nothing online was real—not even these life-size quarrels you I so paint vibrantly! There were no permanent enemies as everything was as plastic and as superficial. Why? Because if you think like I did—the end of relationship between Cherrie and the hags—you are deader than dodo. That’s why on that basis alone, you’d never understand our concrete plans to get together once again. And why I was on my knees and asking the hand of a woman whose example rivalled that of Delilah and other shrewd Bible celebrities.
Finding encouragement from their denouncement and their dissuasion, she plainly acknowledged as a woman amongst women (by sort of freemasonry) what she would have been mortified to admit to others before. Not only was she sinking a level deeper and bragging about it but also, still lower, ridiculing their boldness, their insistence in saving themselves innocent!
But then, she was threatened with blackmail, as the lawyers accusingly put, ‘qui facit per alium, facit per se’, whoever does anything through another, does it themselves, that: ‘This love game is ours, not yours, and you have gone too far in your quest for pulling the carpet off the feet of our noble assignment. Don’t think we’ll find no means to avenge ourselves of a witch who has derailed a noble process. You have the last chance to get back your BFA here or else, the world would know!’
They threw all their finer feelings out of the window and a savage obsession overwhelmed them. After all, she was just a ‘woman’ and had her skeleton share of animal infatuations in her cupboard. They were ready to descend deeper than she had in rallying for the support of the crowd mentality around their villainous cravings—and not remorseful even for a pinch second! What retribution, vengeance and reprisal could castigate the depth of such misdemeanour?
The debauchery completely vindicated my character and there was no scandal in me deactivating my account after that. Now, the guilt was squarely on those hags who, for their own egocentric insolence and interests, restrained my willpower. In fact, it was sort of a cosmic irony—meeting the very object that you were desperately running away from—and all the actors in this comedy converged towards that end. For us, we were better out there than the charade of the hags, and now not just one hag, but all the civilization of hags after our necks. To the hags themselves, their pedal, which they could use to force us to toe the party line of their conformity, had prematurely miscarried and was degenerating before their own eyes.
You also realise that there is nothing tangible on our squabbles. What tears apart our disparity in opinion is principle—not its essence—and that is irreversible. Funny, isn’t it? But on second thoughts, not so funny. If you and I argued over the actual size and weight of an elephant, we could google it and find the proper size and weight from verified sources. But what if our wrangles were those of the three blind mice? The one that touched its tail would always claim it’s a thin creature. The one that touched its tusks will always know the elephant as made only of bones while the third will have a God-knows what mind-set. How would we settle that?
We could reconcile on a concession though, couldn’t we, that it’s ridiculous and pointless to quarrel over the size of elephants without putting hard evidence on the table. Or, we could compromise, that indeed there exists such an animal as an elephant and agree to disagree on its actual size. Better still, get second and third opinions about sizes of elephants. That’s how Cherrie and I viewed the real elephant of life—we didn’t agree of course on its style, but on the rhythm of life, we had reached a state of give and take, and especially when things were elephant.
And when I made the one and only international ‘proposal’ a man made to a woman, she sighed heavily in ecstasy —such ecstasy could not reveal itself unpretentious enough without a badge of overwhelming rapture. Did she break into a monsoon of tears? You’d ask. I’d shed a tear too (in one eye but smile with the other) just to think about that sweet-bitter momentous occasion and sigh a big ‘Yes’, in immense measure!
She shed a sort of excessive compassionate tears, and I would be quick to add that there are no eyes more truthful than those bathed by tears are. How much better it is to weep at joy than to joy at weeping! Her tears however were only dripping from her eyes. When I think of what happened to me, mine springs from the soles of my feet, from my boots, oozing all over from my fiery vengeful eyes, sizzling more than the blood Jesus shed at his Transfiguration.
Initially, most of our chats resulted into fights and to issues, which resurrected our previous arguments, and those quarrels, had a penchant to relapse all over again any instant to mortifying Mona lizards humours. There lingered only those secluded interludes of amorousness, which still showed up sometimes but were so short-lived. Those became lonely harbours at which we anchored our little love-boats for a while, before taking another plunge deep upon that sea of grotesque resentment, which like a heart on fire, flared forth in the words of our mouths.
There was a mutual sensation of disquiet between us, although we had reassured ourselves, and even guaranteed, that dark bygones were dark bygones, we sensed a small amount of trepidation when occupied even in a minor intercourse or even when sharing a bed of humour. Such is often the case with someone travelling on the road to Damascus
But to melt in yearning for love and remain calm about it was a pompous punishment I could desecrate my heart. What good was bigotry to me—sneering on the surface at her kind, but lying awake night after night thinking about her? No good! It only defrosted and thawed my heart into an intolerable numbness when all the love juice melted out! I thought that proverbial time healed and walls concealed unpleasant things, but what a falsehood! It could never be true! When things crawl and lodge deep within us, there is nothing or anyone who can change them—changing them is like trying to sweep away the vast oceans.
When the truth dawned on her that our concrete plans were actually coming to fruition after all, she confessed that in her wildest of fancies, she was having her wedding reception in a large cathedral in Notre Dame with Mona Lisa painting hung beside the Madonna. But it was for man to propose—and woman to accept the proposal—to humour that old, old, maxim a wee bit.
It was an added advantage to me that women changed their shapes more than men did their minds, for when I realised finally that the fountain of her mind was lucid enough to irrigate my fertile imagination on it, I was beside myself, drawing humour in its scabbard and spraying it on hers.
CHERRIE: I was right in purchasing Egyptian linen for my romantique Pharaoh.
ROUND SQUARE: Would we have king-size or queen-size dreams under them?
CHERRIE: You are just being polite, in my heart of hearts; I don’t deserve to be with you in the bubbles.
ROUND SQUARE: We’ve been through fire and brimstone, what else could be worse? Being diabetic? Having kidney stones? It’s the inside person I want to spend time in the bubbles.
CHERRIE: True that. It’s the inside person that counts, not my albinism.
ROUND SQUARE: Having genes of a recessive albino? Don’t you realise how unique that makes you? Didn’t you know that Christ himself was an albino?
CHERRIE: You mean, Christ of the Bible?
ROUND SQUARE: Yes indeed, Christ of the Bible, an albino like you, his skin was dazzling white during the TransfigurationJJ.
There was no arrier pensee. There was only an explanation in our own words. That before God had created the world; He had all souls stored together in one place and while some souls connected, while others crossed paths, ours fell in love. That’s why people who had never met before burned in love or melted in jealousy at the first sight. It was all the language of the soul speaking to the often obstinate and dumb body.
My next stop for summer was Paris Paris
Read about the reversal of events in my final part ‘What goes around…’
Posts
