Afternoon Delights
Year of the Golden Gilled Boar, 1983, Kliloln, Naesu 24th
Never has songs about leaving one’s heart in a place somewhere hit me than on our way back to the castle. Figuratively. My thoughts remained at the side of the road at the big market. I could not stop thinking about it, that encounter. For reasons. Valid reasons.
Reasons like the most glorious redhead I have ever seen in pictures or in real life. A unicorn, so to speak.
Men are really just boys with responsibilities and in times where we get just a little bit of rest from all that, we tend to just talk of nonsensical things. A conversation I had came to mind. This was when I was out drinking with friends and the topic was about women. Exactly the kind of woman at The Queen’s Way.
Women who stop you on your tracks. You find yourself holding your breath as they pass. Things slow down while you helplessly stand there just taking in all that beauty, that air, that power, knowing you will never come to spend time with someone like that.
As that conversation progressed, some things became evident. These kinds of women don’t have to be one’s picture of an ideal mate. They don’t have to do anything except exist at that moment. They will appear like a phantom figure in the periphery of your vision and by the time you realize it, they have disappeared. Walked away. Gone. And they are terrifying.
Terrifying in a way that it makes you feel like you do not deserve to be in the same place, sharing the same air as them. Scary in a way that until the experience is over, you are unable to formulate a valid thought. Frightening in a sense that as soon as you even think of making a move, all your insecurities float to the surface and you resign yourself to knowing that you will never be enough for such a woman. You are lacking and you know it. The whole experience is both exhilarating and downright saddening.
I said then that these kinds of women walked with demons, but the demons are not with or in them, but with you. I still subscribe to that philosophy to this day, and I just encountered another. Only this one was on a much higher level.
I have long pondered on my inability to speak in the tongue of my previous life here on this world. I think in it, I can write it, but I cannot speak it willfully. Made up words work but legible sentences don’t. Except in a few situations.
In states of high emotional excitement, I sometimes manage to blurt out some words. Still, it is never in complete sentences. So far, it has mostly been expletives, and only when it applied to the thoughts I was having.
Other times are when I’m not really thinking and I just blurt out the first thing that comes to my head, like a reflex action. How I came to be Jorj in this world is one example.
An exception, rather than a rule, is when I am calm and trusting enough that I just have no walls put up. Such was the case when I told Hanni my story back at the massive underground complex. It was the first time I was able to speak my real name and yet, not even a minute in her presence, she drew it out of me.
How?
The other reason was not only who Zil was but also how she and Hanni knew each other. Their exchange was not like that of passing acquaintances. She was the only person I know of, outside of the people in our circle, that Hanni not only recognized but actually knew.
I have long resigned myself to thinking that day will not come, the day when Hanni tells me about herself. Where she came from, how she is what she is, how she knows what she knows. Anything about her. I sometimes kid myself into accepting that she might be suffering a form of specific but limited amnesia, like how they do in movies, the tropey variety.
That was not the case, of course. If any, Hanni is so sure of things that there was no way she could be suffering loss of memory of any kind. I hoped she would share some bits and pieces about her, especially that now she knew about the secret I’m keeping, but so far, she hasn’t. Nor was there any indication that she will.
As things stood, she might actually leave, might actually be thinking of leaving any time soon, and I would never know. It was and is, not my place to ask. I don’t have that right. So, I just dismissed the thought whenever it came up. And just when I was learning to, in comes a new player out of thin air who just so happens to be interesting enough by herself to make me ask these questions again.
Then, there was their short exchange. Hanni, in the short time I have known her, had always been direct. She didn’t sugarcoat, and only once did she consider someone else’s feelings before speaking her mind. The only time she showed emotion was when she fought. She was not rude or dismissive however, which made that conversation all the more curious. She was just, I guess due to her own skills, or predilictions, blunt. Sometimes hurtfully so. But that was just her.
Not only did she want the redhead gone from her presence, she also called her old and ugly. Zil was the opposite of ugly. As for old, I’d say she was in her late twenties, no older than thirty. That was about our age. At least I think Hanni too was around the same age, I didn’t know for sure.
It would serve you well to remember to go the other way whenever you see that hag, Hanni said when I asked how they knew each other.
What did she do to piss Hanni off?