Intro...etc

On the twenty sixth of May this year, I called her up. It was her birthday, and I was damn cheerful while wishing her, I talked to her about her vacation plans, about how things were in general and about what she intended to do on her Birthday. Then I kept the receiver down, and vowed to myself to never call her up again, nor contact her through any means. This was supposed to be the final phone call from me to her.

She didn’t know about that, of course. I was careful enough not to give her a hint that this was the final time I would be talking to her on the phone. Or off it, for that matter.

There is no exact point at which this story can be said to have a start. Such stories occur in most peoples’ life, and many a times they are short, can be forgotten easily, or to put it simply, they do not last for around half a decade, and leave a mixed after taste,

So I am at a dilemma, where do I start? Should I start at the beginning? When was the beginning? Or was there a beginning at all?

I have narrated this ‘tale’ of mine to most of my friends, in bits and pieces, scratched together like a drunk rock guitarist trying to piece together a lengthy guitar solo at the best and the last rock concert of his life. Trying to bend all the requisite tones, trying to use the effect pedals to the maximum. He keeps on forgetting the next note, and then he is not quite capable of remembering the previous. In the end, he tries to hurry off to a finish line, when the guitar solo is over and done with, and with that he hopes to break his guitar on the stage, in a brutal but memorable finale. The guitar however turns to be unbreakable, and he leaves the stage where he wants to live hurriedly, hoping to salvage something from this performance. The drunken guitarist is however acutely aware of his failure, and also of the fact that his intoxication has rendered him incapable of sliding up and down the fret board.

Today however, I am not a drunk guitarist. This is me, I have my guitar in my hand, and I am going to play a long, uninterrupted solo.

Unplugged.

What is a cliché? Is it something that happens to everyone? Or is it something that happens to one person repeatedly, to the point of being redundant?

We search for coincidence (or comparable stories), and call it a cliché. And the biggest examples of these so-called Clichés are these ‘so-called’ stories of unrequited love.

To put it in a nutshell, boy loves girl, girl is not interested, boy persists, and girl desists. And it all leads to a somewhat convergent series sort of end to a sad and bad story.

Have I seen a movie with that story?

Have you?

Definitely, maybe.

So we have to start from a point somewhere in the past, since the future seems too far away. And here I proceed to throw a stone across the field of my past and wait for it to land somewhere that can serve as a legit starting position. And from there I might decide to throw a stone at another point or I may emulate the great runners and run across the field to the finish line. (The starting line in this case is heavily blurred, and is not clear; I would need a little help from my friends on that one).

‘See the stone set in your eyes

See the thorn twist in your side

I wait for you’

For starters, and for much of the main course, let’s see…who is she? How did she come into my life? Or, how did I come into her life for that matter (did I ever?).

I have been strumming up too many questions, I believe, and it’s time now to stop being fanciful and start something. There will be a time for everything, first impressions, handshakes, laughter, forgetting, Milan Kundera, you name it and before you want it you will have it in your hands.

(The guitar seems to be tuned properly now, all the strings taut and responding reflexively under my touch.)

And now the first thing I’ll have to curb is my tendency to become the drunken guitarist. No more scratchy pieced together solos, this is final, unplugged.