Loveless in London

Long ago she had a dream, a vision of love. She saw a form so amorphous so amorous: a deep dark hue of blue tenderly inked across a pink sky like velvet caressing voile, swelling to shape a serene and saccharine sight of sheer beauty. She started to search for that dream in reality, seeking that pink blue light everywhere, in everyone. It was as though a specter were haunting her senses – the specter of longing.

The longing brought her to London. Attempts were made to find a place for the heart in a city without a soul, panning out love from stoical soils. Oh there were many attempts - some more desperate than others: walking aimlessly in anonymous streets, browsing through busy bookshops, sitting in tubes to stare and search, attending shows with attention on the audience, dining in crowded restaurants, drinking coffee in Café Nero… always alone, always hoping.

Two years passed. One evening she stepped on the northern line tube at peak hour and found her face compressed against the armpit of a belching giant. Topless and tattooed, bejeweled and bouncing, hirsute and horny, the giant’s body was an exquisite artistry of flesh created to speak for all that is kitsch in humans. With anger and awe tickling her senses, she dared a look up - and froze. The beast had pink and blue hair.


…. Is it all sophistry? Is it an illusion? A mirage? Is there a tincture of madness tainting the soul of a Romantic that eventually leads to her downfall? She knew that day in the tube that the dream she had lived to realize had died; the giant’s pink and blue hair mocked the ideal of love she had sought. Is this irony? Is it tragedy? How is it that a small dream can spawn a yearning so great that it becomes the entire essence of one’s existence? Why would that yearning ripen for fruition only to become aware of its own impotence?

Novalis wrote, “the world becomes a dream, the dream becomes reality.” When you feverishly pursue the object or ideal of your dream, you paint your world with colors borrowed from that dream, and in return your real world becomes a reflection of your dream world. Dreams are like stardust, and reality is silhouetted against the nebula of fanciful fragments. Life becomes a bisque blue haze of lulling intangibility. The only real thing left is this longing - this paralyzed desire that sits menacingly in the heart like a glass splinter.

The longing is different in different people. Its effect also varies: the coy crave and become corrupt; the passionate pine away, languished with longing, and become promiscuous. Our girl sits out in her balcony every night… some nights she is alone, most nights just lonely. Sometimes she cries; soft ripples running sprightly down her face in a fiery cataract of sorrow, scorching all that was once serene and saccharine. And she wonders why each night is a funeral for dead dreams, why the glinting stars all volley her with wanton glares from an unwanted longing, why the swarthy sky entombs her smile, why? … She is loveless. A pain pulsates through her veins and she quivers.