Alis and the equinox


1

Sunrise, like the sunshine in her eyes, shone into the room, twin rays suspended in dust. Why sleep anymore, she told herself, the clouds float snowflake white, the sky pale blue; night shifts into day, therefore, what else but for sleep to fade away, till the sun sets again, and other distant suns glint like steel in the sky..

2

Where are we, dear reader, and in whose shadow do we wake up? The lady who was lately asleep is Alis. I write Alis a hundred letters everyday, but none of them reach her. Oh no, not another of those mushy jilted lover things, you must be telling yourself. Relax. I do not exist for her. Literally. You see, in a very distant past, all of humanity woke up, on one such mild midsummer morning, and found that men and women had been dimensionally separated, set forever adrift to float on the indifferent fabric of the cosmos, and although spatial separation was negligible, it could well have been infinite, because the dream distance was tangibly staryears long. Humanity just existed in different dimensions, even across the same room. If you were drinking your coffee in bed with your guy, and voila, in a blink of those beautiful eyelashes, he ceases to exist, you are in bed alone. This breach, you find, exists beyond time, you do not even remember him.
You drink your coffee, easy, calm, and peaceful. As can reasonably be expected from as strange an event as this, things did not happen logically. Moments of chaos are difficult to map with any certainty, it is quite pointless to expect things like symmetry, normalcy and logic in how these things happen. Things happened differently for the guys. The difference was small, yet immeasurably significant. The male of the species could still see the female. For your guy, you were still real. But he had just been condemned to this eternal silence because he could now never talk to you. The two of you existed in different dimensions, the breach was total and irrevocable. For you, dear reader, the male since then has been only a vision, a scepter, that wisp of smoke, curling up serpentine from your fortieth cigarette of the day, nothing more, nothing less.




3

The dark-green water reflects the pale blue sky in a conceit of white cloud, violet grey mirror of delusion as the sun rises ever so slowly in the saffron white east. Alis steps into the garden, like porcelain in her jade kimono of red silk. She feels the dew wet her feet as she walks the green green grass underfoot, and rays of sunlight lose their way in the soft goldglint of her hair. Tired of the walk, Alis lies down and languidly inhales from her emerald hookah, rose petals floating on the water as almost invisible water-spiders flit across the frame leaving imperceptible waves in their wake

Selves splinter into infinite lines three-dimensional across the infinite sphere of time and dissolving space, and Alis finds herself one with the radiant truth, which is a ray of light and an infinite vision at the same time. She could be thinking this thought, writing these very words down, and yet she was inherent in all the alphabets of the dreamt, spoken and forgotten languages, and in these seemingly inadequate words could mean all being as had been, was and would be. Her kimono, though red, could be tangerine, jade, turquoise or aquamarine, and yet be red at the same time.


4

I wake up, or perhaps start dreaming, either of the two. Clarification is tiresome. My earflute plays the music of falling cherryflakes on their slow waltz down to the snow, I breath in the sharp tang of pine drifting into my not-too-high skyloft out of the greenforest below. If you want a frank answer, I prefer tea to coffee. Somehow this translucent mountain-stream of amber is aesthetically and spiritually more becoming than the oaken strength and lucidity of coffee, and I contemplatively sip out of my impossibly frail cup as gentle scent-steam brightens up my room with travelling fairy-tales and aethereal mirages of light-shadow gardens across windseas and cloudskies with careful dreams of long forgotten lands of mist and morning snow

5

The afternoon has not been without a hint of discord and doubt. If you smell the scent of flowers all day long, then even fragrance can overwhelm, and you will desire the mundane reality of everyday air, tired of this continual stream of delicate invective. Is not reality abrupt, unexpected, and disruptive? This imagined universe of infinitely languid midsummer afternoons is ultimately delusory, is it not? Will it do if we but dream, and not care to realise them? Perhaps it will, perhaps it will not. I shrug. Drink my tea, red as a translucent rose. It is futile to believe in choices, and to think that you have a modicum of control over your existence. There is what you expect, and then there is that which perceptibly happens. Different realities, or maybe the same. I cannot reliably say, stuck as I am in this shell, this form, me as I conceive myself. The cosmos is not egocentric. It is alien, without, and not within. What is within you is the memory the form leaves on your mind, and the form itself is beyond comprehension, abstract, blue veined and colourless.