"For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?"
T.S Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
He reads with vacant eyes and a wandering concentration. Shifting on his bed in his Spartan room, our protagonist has furrowed eyebrows and intent eyes upon the novel. It is late at night and the lukewarm tea next to his bed steams for his attention quietly. The clock strikes incessantly, the second hand moving without care of the interruption it causes towards him and his reading exercise. Of course, he wants to read, yet he cannot muster enough mental elasticity to read like he wants to read. He wants to binge on books, devour them with fervor, re-enact them with deluded reality, douse them with inexplicable meaning, and mark them with nuances and irony. Some people drink, but he thinks he reads to forget. But, of course he cannot. Dickens’ words are not as easily absorbed by the mind as alcohol is via the blood stream.
Again, the same thoughts interrupt his uneasy grip on the novel. Should he have done something else? She was right in front of him, flirting, teasing with her eyes and her words. A dear friend, an attractive and compatible personality with good tastes, intellectual and actually humourous at times. What more could he want? He could have been hearing her stories instead of fussy old Dickens’. What was he thinking really?
Actually he knows what he was thinking. She was and still is very friendly. Time has allowed him to understand her much better. Time has allowed the shift from a mere acquaintance to a close friend. Time has allowed him to flirt with her innocuously without any serious repercussions—or so he thinks. It’s only shared time he thinks that binds him to her. But, are not shared experiences that do generally bind people? People become friends or foes through similar processes. But what about love? If this were true, then Cupid’s arrow should not pierce through wanton strangers but through only close friends with a shared history. But that cannot be right as we have often heard the claims of love at first sight or the less extreme cases of it being found in little known people. Either he is not in love, or those have thus loved with swiftness have not loved at all.
He is generally a rational lad. He would submit all else in the world to rational scrutiny, but love? He cannot sincerely put it under the same microscope without a sense of uneasiness. Love is by definition irrational, so why does he even bother to rationalize? But, how can he know if he is in love without some signs, some concreteness in its symptoms? He fears he might learn it too late. Death-bed confessions and conversions mean nothing to him.
What should he have done? What should he do next? Time with her winged chariot urges him to make a move soon or remain mute forever. It is time again that presses him to a decision.
So, he pours upon the book, hoping to find serendipitous answers in arcane passages by obscure characters. He does not decide. Impulse, he believes, should drive him to his solution. But, impulse and him? The only thing close to impulse that he knew was its physical definition about abrupt change in momentum. His placid and laconic character did not lend itself to impulse. Yet he has no other option.
The next day he meets her in the usual coffee place after classes. Nothing is special about the place, the coffee, or the event. He has fiddled with the same napkin holder uncountable times while recounting his ironic and often absurd stories. They have looked through the same window at people sitting outside the place sipping coffee and smoking pensive cigarettes. He even thinks they have switched her present cup with her old one where the lipstick marks appear exactly above the coffee label, the same as every other time. She’s the same: beautiful and sociable, optimistic and dainty, always interested and interesting. So what has changed? What has he done to himself? Is she still the same even after these few months of relatively intimate and lonely interactions? They converse as usual, from literature to world affairs to the vanilla and mundane. The topic of a potential mate often pops up in their talks, and it does so today too. She complains via her cryptic jokes: ‘Even if the eyes approve the biology, the soul usually rejects the chemistry.’ He smiles in approval.
‘But what about us?’ he thinks. Do we not spend hours chatting about anything? Do we not share the same passion for literature? The reason he could not finish that Dickens book was because he had started to read it with her a few days ago. Do we not enjoy each other’s company? He found her perfectly beautiful and unblemished even though reality refused to agree. Did she not find him attractive? Did she not find him worthy of a lover?
He will never know, for he never asked her. They continued to be friends, close ones too, but never anything beyond that. Even though he has hardly ever espoused a romantic view of the world, he was sure never to have anything of such a kind ever after this. He had grown jaded after his first love affair, but after this second abortive one, he failed to understand those Shakespearean sonnets which he had previously relished over as his credo. Life was nothing like those of the Romantic comedies where everything works out perfectly at the end of the all the trouble and impediments. Life, well, just continues, no matter how anti-climactic or miserable.
