Author’s Note: I have been toying around and discovering how Substack works and only after I began publishing chapters from this story did I catch the idea of recording the audio.
Sadly, one cannot drop an .mp3 into a pre-populated “Newsletter” template so those first chapters will run silent, run deep with you, the reader’s own voice as narrator or imagining mine. Bummer. In the meantime, feel free to read with an interactive soundtrack. Lovely cover of The Wailers’ "Three Little Birds.”
I’ve finished the final episodes and already started penning another story sooo…
This Podcast is still “in production.” 👌🏻💀
Bon Appétite! 👇🏻👨🏻🍳🍸🍝
Three Little Tweets. Outside my Doorstep. Singing…
Should I say something to get kicked off? 😄
Spending my hottest years discussing NLR issues 🔥
Buying books and reading are two entirely unique practices❤️
Something like that.
You’re outta sight. Do any of your readers ever see and feel what I do? I think I’m virtually in love with You, Nih💘l. Your words, Your shares, Your Inner Light somehow slaking my inexplicable thirst and in shining down upon me from somewhere I can’t gather. It was as divine as that of Aphrodite from another time, bestowed upon me from the abiding love between her brainy eyes, mighty life giving thighs and delicate milk of kindness bearing breasts. All I was missing was the wisdom of Athena, which ME Thinks you possess.
It’s my postulation we all deny our own divinity, move about the cabin, not enough if much at all aware in a profound way or even modestly of our incandescence, our radiance and ethereal, ephemeral transcendence as a medium of God, a vessel`. Still, We persist here on Earth in human form to do the proverbial work of God, Yahweh, Allah, the gods and goddesses like Shiva —whomever we make in our reflection.
That’s #METwo. That’s You. I suppose it’s the point in some way of humans in their highest self if they choose but too often the path for (98.8% I calculate) is greed, atrocities and vulgarity.
I knew a girl. Let’s call her Persephone. Maybe that makes ME Hades?? LMAO. In 2022 she will be half my age. The irony to fall so hard for someone, like You, so out of my league. I met her on a September midday, 2019 in Athens, Greece. I don’t doubt that You arrive in the wake of memories, reflections and dreams now washed away. I was not so much singularly caught up in her nor entranced by our mutual, subtle stare as much as found her professional manner the part to endear and then her talk of coming to New York somewhat lit me up but then again I had been on a long arc of travels with my father, with whom she spoke when in her role as hotel clerk she ushered us to our room and this, our final leg of a journey as father and son meeting our homeland, our kin, for the very first time, was all it took for me to seed the thought of hope, to unwittingly find myself hooked by a dark, luminous beauty with her hesitant English, polished nails and reserved ways, inspired for what ever reasons to hand her the next day a hand written note and my business card, the one much later she would for no apparent reason I could discern, casually mock, unbelievably yet perhaps not so if she is a narcissist, t’would make complete sense. After she had taken me for everything, my sex, my services, my abode and my psychological space but especially my heart, which she so lovingly dissected, eviscerated and shred, still, I persist. I yet am so ever-in-love and always will be with her. Love is Love. I am grateful for her. She broke my heart — wide open, wide apart. She helped me find love in everything, embrace all the realities we all live.
Sadly, she demurred within her small London-born, Grecian-reared self, turning away from Her Self, the place I imagined where we had met, limited to the confines of her ego, vanity’s mirror and that of the noise within her four walls — which I totally get, I apprehend. Been there. Done that. I totally relate with all I have wrestled and it was unfair for me to want her to be ready to meet me.
Bonus Fun Fact: My first girlfriend had the same birthday a generation ago and while that was part of my comfort zone, that we had been so perfect a long time ago, I also had been as immature at 24 and was in no way ready to grow. The utmost challenge is the human shape to which we are all assigned, the one through which we must navigate our brief, mortal existence with obvious external parts, penned in and constrained by society’s definitions and demands. I get it. I am a recovering man in a world built on objectifying You, all of you - Women.
I defy these mindless apparitions of conformity, appropriating our own self-actualization and self-control in ways from which we may liberate with art, song, words like these or quill and ink and in places as this, a tablet or a phone, reaching out to a world without borders, one that will absorb and apprehend, absolve and release us of this bondage, this incarnation, this endemic isolation always encroaching and increasing in mounting frustrations long before the expression of illness was a novel idea, trending in trendy #coronavirus form, spreading throughout the global population, a metaphysical manifestation of all the sickness’ symptoms we’ve borne, all the weight of our suffering to which we each alone are tethered and conscripted, the only one, our self, with whom we must each exist twenty four and seven, night and day, isolated minds and souls, unique yet alone with Our Self to dwell amongst the carnage and the ruins, the confusion and the chaos, the beauty and the glory, the sadness and the serenity a journey we undertake in only passing swatches of the seasons’ fabric, those of our planet and the ones our lives inhabit with each pass of the Sun, Moon and Planets, from the trail of a shooting star’s fleeting wish to dreams left behind in the wake of The Perseids or Geminids.
Each time I read a little stardust that trails behind you, knowing the moment’s fleeting as You move on, unawares of the magic with which You streak across the starry night, the moment, the very moment You hit send, I am less alone. Your words transform ‘You’ and ‘Me’ into ‘We,’ now singularly together the embodiment of Light, Love in its highest form and Yours shines brightest of all. So what if we never meet? You are the greatest gift, awakening me and flowering within me.
I am smitten, Nihal. That Mind and your humor, the temperament and the mystery behind your veil sketch a picture that is more than — as they say in Hollywood — smoldering looks. So what if the hook, your picture, baited me as I swam by and you caught my eye with ‘my type?” It’s in the brains, Babe, to wit. You stand for something and in your opening up my mind that has me now here, pondering back to that same said travel, My Road to Damascus, the one I walked alone on a Paros September Morn, roosters and goats crowing and bleating in the misty dawn and again, each day the same proverbial walk undertook with my father, friend and complete unknown, a stranger and adversary, together and each of us alone on a journey whose ultimate destination is yet to be written, the pages left to fill still. The roots of his, mine, Our Patriarchy.
Dad and I took those walks two years ago starting in Constantinople, a visit to The Holy See, The Rock as I call it because it’s, ironically, a theocratic patriarchy under occupation in an occupied metropolis, an autocratic state posing as democratic. “We The People” are not far behind. It already likely is too late and we are such. Anyway, The Ecumenical Patriarch is monitored, limited in abilities to come and go from his occupied city. We were blessed to have an audience with His All Holiness Bartholomew, a devout Minister of God, Seeker of peace, human epitome of compassion and eloquence, elected as head representative to perform a religious — but really on behalf of all people’s chosen definitions— rep. here on Earth in God’s stead, a noble and kind man with a quiet and knowing gaze, is simple even in the excess of my praise.
We took a picture all together, as many pilgrims come to do and I touched his elbow, unawares I was doing so until minutes after I shared with my brother who was with us in spirit but could not attend, jotted back, “DUDE! WHY are you touching His Holiness’ arm like a Bruh???” I couldn’t help but laugh. It was true. The same might now be said of how I feel so endeared to You, a complete stranger.
I don’t exaggerate when I say in your words, and the voice the former give to humane and universal truths, I hear and witness something so beautiful and funny and fun, touching and pained, emotional and emotive, something that transcends the face of You, touching me to my very core. Scrolling down Twitter Boulevard from the first time I glanced up your lane, I began to read a series of insights, ideas to feed my fertile mind, spurring my imagination to see beyond my own naivety and a balm from what feels an endless continual condition in which I work remotely, isolate, a suspended animation with so much yet to know of where this world will in the coming months and years choose to go —The truth of unceasing, increasing human suffering serving as backdrop to brutal oppression and utter lack of consequences for the corrupt, often exonerated and even rewarded, deified and a ‘cruetality,’ cruel brutality, a sociopath’s avarice who hungers only to end the promise of hope, of possibilities.
Our condition has never truly changed in its precarious nature, fragile illusions in promise for better days, preconditioned long before a plethora of pandemic restrictions, fear and illness, now acutely manifest on a global scale, both exposing and leveling the game even as the chasm between the predators and those upon whom they exponentially grows, finite realities of dwindling resources and their inequitable distribution, the biggest disruptors of financial and information inequity persist, exacerbate the dividing wedge. I don’t want to sidetrack and it is a conversation to pin for another place perhaps but does anyone even recognize that the occasion of a virus is nothing novel compared to the persistent dangers and disasters unfolding at every hour, all of them the man made kind — famine, war, poverty, subjugation, vulgarity — the futility of any and all nations under their gods to seek independent sustenance, prosperity in the face of imperial domination and, the cruelest of them all, indifference?
Then, again, when such atrocities collectively bind and blind us with often unwitting rage, despair and sadness, is it any wonder that Love abates, struggles in Her quest to thrive and make prosperous the Advent of Hope?
It was the same when I entreated Persephone to find me when she traveled this way. She took up the offer and in the afterglow of our Big Apple Roman Holiday, I probably should have let her go and not looked back. She told me she was in love. I already was and went all in. It was a most wonderful time of my years until it wasn’t, until the football was yanked away as I spent time listening to someone slowly tear me, bring me down, disappearing me from her life after — I suppose— she ran scared or she had taken what she needed and, as she said, “I changed my mind, get excited and live in the moment. People have a right to change their mind.” I guess. Maybe I was just a dare, a pelt with a shiny coat to take back to her equally bored Grecian princesses who could swap sailor stories, contrast and compare. That’s ok. Women deserve locker talk, too. Maybe she no longer had any excuse posing as reasoned logic that was sound to live out loud any of the dreams she instigated, triggered and awakened within me. That’s perfectly ok. It is.
I’ll be fine. We’ll always have New York. And Athens. Oh, Philadelphia and D.C., too but not London where, before she found her footing to do it alone, she entreated me to move together —maybe to not live out our lives and grow old, maybe a lie she told and maybe only to her self but I found that her too-good-to-be-true desire and love and affection, while not a lie perhaps were not all they were cracked up to be. I don’t deny I dream of a dream, maybe you and me because Love is never one-dimension or one take. Maybe You and I can have Paris, Rome …and Cairo. I can dream. Can’t I?
Maybe just one more try.
Soundtrack By:
Ben Henriques Quintet
Bibliography
