In The Mood For Love

Imagine smoke and mirrors. Smoke, often from his cigarette and more than a couple of mirrors, facing each other at varied angles, light reflecting and refracting as it wished, without restraint, through red curtains and green bed spreads and tiled marbled floors coloured like a chessboard, printed wallpaper with chequered designs, of light blue, or deeper, a lampshade or two, a can for carrying soup, an umpteen number of bottles, spread across, the entire room feels like a living kaleidoscope, beside her fuchsia lipstick. And music playing in the background, probably, cello, or the trombone, that digs a hole in your soul. Only that, everything that is is thoroughly jaded. So as not to stand out but to merge with an oblivion, creating a subtle lust in our mind and slowing passing it down to our gut.

Just as, at times the vastness and beauty of the universe makes us feel tiny and inconsequential, a great work or art, a masterpiece such as this, decimates me beyond human imagination. I am all but flattered that I came to witness it, purely as an act of coincidence.

It is as if, by itself an enigmatic repository of memories, the actual events corresponding to which I never experienced, however, I somehow, ironically, carry those memories around. Guilty as charged, my heart full of shame and broken at that, by love that didn't last. This causes a universal amnesia of sorts. We have all been there, ages ago, in that same room of dull yellow light. And impersonated conversations, spaced out with sighs. And rainy alleys and damp staircases and singular light bulbs on the streets that have been proof of so much love, abandoned, so much love, forgotten. So many phrases, left unsaid, so much skin left untouched, unseen.

But just smoke and mirrors. Smoke and mirrors. Smoke and mirrors.



1 comment:

Vagabond said...

I saw it a few years ago, I cannot claim that I understood it completely back then but it struck me as beautiful.I saw it again and I ended up wishing I never 'matured' enough to understand it.