The end and the beginning Pt.II

Why am I so lonely? Hmmmmmmmm........ Good question. Put like that I realized for the first time in my life that despite being surrounded on all sides by people I was, I am lonely. Lonely for what? And whose absence am I lamenting? What was it about her that forced me to question myself and look for answers on a small shaft of sunlight falling into the room? I decided to give her my full attention and put away my virgin copy of Friends, Lovers, Chocolate and plunged headfirst into that fabulous aura.

She smiled then. Childlike, a little girl having got her way on first try. Very slowly she adjusted her sinews in an effort to contain her energy and then without any prevarication, she began to tell me the first of her stories that were more truth than fiction, more fire than there is water in the oceans and more darkness than there is light.

What would you expect from a poor little rich girl? Debauchery? parents with more money than sense giving in to every whim of a child who wore her heart on her sleeve, making every effort to give you evrything you want except love. What did I epect from her?
Truthfully I expected nothing from her. But she wanted to tell me, bind me to her soul with hoops of steel as a famous poet once exhorted his son to were he ever to find true friends.
She talked for hours. The light grew softer. Darkness began to fall. The classroom filled with anticipation slowing curdling to exasperation and then to a finality of knowledge that the wait is futile.
I sat there. Mesmerized by her story. I knew from the beginning that her ability to lie was a well developed faculty. I realized too late that she told me nothing but the truth....

The end and the beginning

I knew she'd get me into trouble. She had that indefinable quality that makes a man want to run in two opposing directions all at once and yet stay put long enough to watch the human time bomb self destruct. She took great pleasure in harming herself. She wasn't into physical violence. She preferred assaulting your mind.
She couldn't feel emotions. Even if she could, she'd learned to push them away from her into that aura of smoke and perfume that surrounded her at all times, the kind of earthy fragrance that is woodsmoke on a cold foggy morning in the hills and the heady scent of perfume in a nightclub, the sound of fragrance crashing with sweat and the silence that follows smoke devils dying in the cold night air.
She left as soon as she came and with the sense of having left behind a part of life that would remain with me for as long i live........
Before you jump to any conclusions, I didn't make the mistake of falling in love with her. It would be the only thing I was able to do for her and perhaps the only reason that she hurt me, clawed at me and did her level best to destroy me but then when she realised that there was some thing some where inside me that she would never be able to touch she left without a trace of bitterness, realising too late that more than she hurt me she had hurt herself.
I am not going to take the moral high ground and claim that she is responsible for what I've become today. I'm not going to claim that I am innocent. She gave me a choice and in trying to walk a tight rope between sanity and surreality, I fell and I'm still trying to find the fine dividing line.
Loyana. That's not her name. But for friendship's sake I will call her that. Don't try to look for her. She's long gone. Merging into an oblivion where even the devil refuses to tread for fear of awakening her.
She simply walked in one day. The way witches waylay lords in midstride. Simply walked in and plonked herself on the table. The soft sunlight of her T-shirt glowing against the backdrop of a pale blue wall, her slim frame outlined clearly, a molten river of chocolate and warm coffee cascading down her back, caressing every alphabet of her spine in a way that bordered on the obscene. The air charged with her aura gave you the impression that a instead of a human being a panther had walked in and settled on the table and was giving off the reek of benignity while enjoying the silent consternation that it' s presence was causing.
The table was a typical brown table that you find in class rooms across the country. Sitting there she didn't look like your typical attention seeking student. She looked like what she was. A woman who grew too fast in the mind and forced her body to catch up. A woman who would push herself and as the poem goes would toss all her earnings on one roll of the dice and if she'd lose, why she'd simply pick herself up and go at it again.
Loyana looked me straight in the eye and said,"Tell me, why are you so lonely?"
With that one question ," She gave me sadness and the gift of pain, a new moon madness and a love of rain."
She was, she is, the end and the beginning.