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For some time now a soft glow of light was quivering over my eyelids as if looking at the sun through a smoked glass while the half-awake mind hung somewhere between a broken dream and last night’s memory. Teasing sounds of flies from left over Durian brought a sense of agitation in a feverish mind lay dull in drunken stupor, made me more stubborn against opening my eyes. “Ah, I don’t want to get up now,” I shouted silently and took her hand which now had no purpose or promise except being part of a sluggish embrace, to cover my eyes. The soft edged shadow of her fingers touched my eyelids with a roughness, as though a perception of rubbing a rusted surface, the result of a long, hard grinding life. And on the checkered surface of light and shadow under my closed eyelids portrait of a mute face half-revealed gradually appeared, drawn only in gray with frail brush strokes. It was the same face I see only in my drunken loneliness. An unknown pain of loss without a clear sense of what is lost (may be thirty five years of time in life and along with that hope of finding love) probably every man suffers when he wakes up alone in a desolate voiceless world after a night-long pleasure of orgasm rubbed my bones. She never spoke a word bitter or sweet, as if language is a barrier in communication between us. Today she assumed the face of my mother, the woman I knew first in my life, the woman whom I loved first in my life, and the woman whom I loved most in my life. “It’s my life ma, let me live it fully. I know I have done many mistakes, but the good news is that I haven’t repeated them again. I have learned from them,” I mumbled.

The face remained mute with a solemn expression of detachment.

“Ah, well maybe I am like this, always in motion running away from something and towards something. I am just caught in this racetrack of life. Yes, I am not what you expected me to be, but I had to find it all by myself who I am, what the hell I want, and when you say life, what exactly does that mean. What ever it is, I still love you, and love the smell of your curry from that time when I and Ron were small and used to play with pots and pans on the kitchen floor. Just give me some more time, maybe I will find my happiness in a stable family life as you always wished.”

Then the face gradually crumpled like a broken image over myriad tiny waves, and disappeared where all lost dreams take refuge. I felt the uneven ridges of the mat on my back and a touch of moist skin from sweat where our legs crossed each other in last night’s dream. I opened my eyes being aware of her existence. Dawn broke through the cracks of wood planks in blades of light where dust motes shifted and spun. On my left, her body not even covered with a single thread she lay motionless, textured with alternate stripes of shadow and light where light mused between black and black. I felt that I am not alone, yet lonely. I closed my eyes again; two lovers lay in the silence of sun side by side in their own inner paradoxical solitude.