Aria

 Below is an excerpt - the first page and a half or so, to be more precise - from the story that I am writing for NaNoWriMo (which takes place during November). The idea stemmed from wanting to write a poem about a friend who is quite special to me but one that I will likely no longer talk to.  For those wondering, yes, I did show her "Aria" (Murray Perahia's rendition) and yes she is thought of as fairly cat-like by her friends. My relationship with her was....well, weird and in some ways painful but ultimately important. This poem is present in the beginning of the story and helped me bring together a story. This November, I wanted to create a story that is not cut off from my own story. I also sought to change my genre focus here from fantasy/supernatural or sci-fi to more of a romance/drama sort of approach.

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The musty book – though, I guess it had only come out earlier this year - lay open to a poem called “Aria”, a reference I vaguely understood as providing deference to the piano works of Bach. Poetry is usually incomprehensible to me, but regardless I decided to try reading. After all, what kind of poet would I be if I shied from such a challenge?

“A black cat licking its paws,
never minding the sun,
yet altogether bathed in its brilliant light.”

My eyes hesitated as I scratched my head; then I kept reading.

“That being as human,
a piano player,
viscous blonde hair extending far downwards,
and pale skin, giving way to red;

Her piercing green eyes,
feline in existence,
that seek out the genuine, that repel the fake;

Simultaneously one apparently lacking elegance,
but with great sophistication and insight:
One who can make an astute comment,
and can also laugh the subject off.

Initially a sinister omen,
a person of discord,
she is revealed to be complex (eccentric);
but then,
as a cat senses its boundaries being overstepped,
I was scratched,
wounding my feelings and self.

Soon the black cat,
amidst torrential rains,
jumped off the wall,
entering the unknown and becoming a memory.

A memory that repeats endlessly,

losing and regaining complexity,
as the entire complex disintegrates steadily,
promising to leave little behind;
even as that person lives,
she grows further and further away into oblivion,
like some sort of anathema.

Buried below the rubble
is a positive feeling that is
emanated from encountering such a person -
and yet, despite the gauntlet of losing this person,
she is missed beyond words.

Despite the gauntlet of losing this person,
I will fight to hold onto this longing,
rather than submit to
the fatal wish of never having met her.”

That poem was rather melodramatic, but something about its writing strikes me – this feeling of total loss, crushing the author slowly but also quickly; as if the only egress was his writing, itself a grave bastion of instability and moroseness. The word ‘gauntlet’ reappearing, to me, signals that this challenge goes beyond ordinary feats and represents an ordeal that reframes, in part, one’s world. I blinked and look down;  regions of tear-stained pages had appeared, centered around the poem I had just read – did “Aria” reach out and grab my human soul? Even though the work seemed as sloppy as something thrown haphazardly together to fulfill a daily writing quota, my numbness had been breached. I would avoid something dramatic such as “the trauma running throughout my life had been utterly exposed” but I had been emotionally revealed for the first time in months. Art has this impressive ability to destroy us through bypassing the cracks in our armor. Without thinking, I had ended up lying on my back, eyes shut, and mind wandering – unable to pinpoint my troubles, I instead became fully submerged in them, as if I could not swim and was forced to drown lugubriously.