A continuation

"The tricky thing about happiness is when you're a child who's not so bright, like me, you're stuck with your parent's idea of happiness until you hit a wall. And believe me, hitting that wall isn't such a pleasant experience."

"A nice family in a nice home with a nice job?" The doctor replied as he followed her sit, leaning against a nicely sized mango tree that embraced the breeze around the two of them.

The girl was a lovechild, a desperate attempt at a son by a son of a haciendero with the French belle best friend of his homosexual brother. Her mother, having no legal claim at the estate of her father, fought for her place in the haciendero's son's family. The haciendero's son's legal lover fought for her's and his two older daughter's. She died, first, in grief and resentment. Then, finally, in a consequential accident. Her mother left her father after and went back to her country. She never remarried, but, rather, distracted herself, isolating herself in her work, earning her own estates. Her father did so as well. So much for happiness.

"That is the conventional happiness. Although it comes in so many forms these days." She retorted with a snide laugh.

"A convenient happiness is more like it." He laughed with her.

"Despite our best efforts to deny our limitations and weaknesses, it always manages to manifest in our inevitable need for stability. We don't change as fast as technology. We ease everything in. We mourn." She continued.

"I remember a few months before Adrian died, we were about seventeen or eighteen then, he introduced me to this guy he was dating."

She still remembers his face so clearly as that bright afternoon. His cheekbones, his jawline, every crease, every dimple, every pore was still embedded on her memory. She remembers that summer. She remembers the marble sidewalks and the white stone walls, how the light illuminated everything in that bleached town. It seemed like a summer haze. The heat, the brightness of the place, the strong perplexing emotions caused by their hormones and their adolescent idealism. The sun was as bright and promising then.

"We were in Marabella. The three of us went out. The guy turned out to be such a darling that we're still good friends now. We went out for drinks, to get high and to dance later in the evening. We were there, the three of us, in the middle of a crowd of mostly half naked men. We all just took another round of purple MG's. We were all peaking. The music was like magic and the moment was just perfect. The three of us were just dancing under a luminescent new moon. It didn't matter that I wasn't his girlfriend anymore. He's my most favorite person in the world. He was the only person who's seen me from childhood up to that point."

"I thought we were going to get married. It didn't matter if he slept with guys." The girl smiled again, faintly but something more radiant like a ray of sunshine from an old world on a cloudy day.

The doctor inhaled the last of the remaining ambience looming from the sunset. Then, he smiled too, with her, as if he was there in that particular moment that was.

"But he wasn't ready to live the rest of his life in the closet?" He asked. 

"He never came out. He didn't have plans. He just didn't want to be happy living a lie."

"It wouldn't be right to live your happiness at his expense either. He's a noble man."

"Of course, I'm telling you this in full confidence that you will honor confidentiality stipulated by our medical relationship."

The doctor laughed.

"Don't worry, mademoiselle. I may not be as noble as your friend but I deeply honor my profession."

Then, for the first time, she laughed an innocent laugh. Not outlined by contempt or scorn but by pure genuine amusement, perhaps, by his self-depreciation or his mildly comforting character that seems to be exactly what she needed.

"I realized that that was happiness. Even if you took out the chemicals out of our system, it would still be. The chemicals just aided our inhibitions out of our system. So I can see the bigger picture. All that mattered was what I felt."

It's a wild world

It's the series that makes Gossip Girl look like Sweet Valley with contrived connivances. It's British. It has some of the most breathtaking, lavishly languid photography I have every seen since Wong Kar-wai teamed up with Christopher Doyle. It has a tastefully rockin' and eclectic soundtrack each episode and lots of cleverly written scenes. It has such tragically beautiful characters like a delusional anorexic slut, a desperate trampy girlfriend and a confused teenage Pakistani. It's honest, unapologetically funny and spot on. No series has ever captured contemporary chemically driven teenage angst like this series has. It's like a hazy trip down memory lane.

It's the series almost everyone I know has mentioned at least once since last year but only a few have seen. And because I was finally compelled by a bootlegged copy I fatefully ran into a few days ago, and yesterday was a such a painfully boring hot day, I lit a joint and spent the whole afternoon and evening with the first season.

I gotta say, anything that can reinvent an old song and put new deeper images to each syllable is a winner in my book. So for now I'll let Cat Stevens linger in my auditory memory and pinch me over and over.

Halcyon Days

There was a time then when I hung out with this bunch of people. We would all meet up, go out in events, hobnob and most especially get high on ecstasy and ketamine, and at times, by accident, cocaine. It would go on for days never ending, like the end was the next hour. It was such a thrilling experience for me. That was the time when I experienced it all. I didn't think, I just let the moment flood through me and take it all in in between fluid compounding breathes. It felt so overwhelming, this comfort, this infinite and interminable happiness I felt in the presence of such fine strangers and it felt like they shared that feeling with me, like we were all moving in this speedy uniform revolution, that trailed fire, and in perfect unison. That was the most fascinating part of it all. Apart from all the minor and seemingly innocuous things I learned about them in the short time I knew them, there were never really any intimate details that was filed in my head, the kind that only two or a few more people grow to share in fondness built through time, but it felt like they were more familiar and closer to me than my own family. I loved them for that. 

My brain works so weird sometimes. I don't pause to think about what's happening but rather record all the awe inspiring details and nuances of that moment and store it for later assessment. Sometimes, those details are scattered in the vastness of my memory, bits and pieces of it scattered, hovering like dust particles do in space. I'm not an expert in organizing thoughts after all. Eventually, in an exact and perfect timing, those details will find each other and build this bigger picture until finally there is no more piece left to fill it up.

Last night, in the last hours of my birthday, I bumped into one of them after not seeing him in such a long time. It felt strange now that their absence in my routine is the one providing me comfort. I started avoiding them for all the things I fear they think of me, things I realized when my brain, in its always tauntingly timing of pausing, stopped to think about what these people really think of me and what they mean to me.

I've heard stories about what happened to the rest after I left through the usual grapevine, faraway from their sights. It seems everyone else has moved on to live and do their own things. Some have stopped dropping ecstasy and snorting ketamine. Most of them still do see each other. I still do see some of them once in a while. It just feels strange now that we're reduced to usual pleasantries and casual conversations and to that cold feeling of realizing that that person is, after all these years of getting high in the darkness and communing on shared hits, in the harshness of the fluorescent lights, a total stranger you are currently sharing an awkward moment with and nothing else to talk about. I've thought about it a thousand times, trying to reason out those things that seem like failures to connect, wondering about what exactly were the facts and where we could've gone wrong. 

Last night as we were leaving another birthday party, when I greeted that guy, gave him a quick beso on the cheeks and politely explained that we were already leaving, I realized that no matter what happened then, all the details that compose the real truth, all the facts will never be revealed to any of us. We will all be left with our version or maybe a consolidated one but never the absolute real version. The matter of the fact is, none of us will ever figure out what really went wrong, and that it was simply and irreversibly the end of those days and that picture has no more piece left to build it on.