It’s evening, the hot afternoon sun has cooled to a warm and sublime sunset, the kind of image you’d see plastered onto a grainy, cheap postcard, like the one I sent to Eleanor from Sri Lanka, which I wrote as I sat by the open door of the train’s carriage looking out at the world as it whizzed past in a constant moving flash of green trees and shacks and people gazing on with serene focus back at our curious eyes like a strange mirror. At the moment, I’m sitting – with a bottle of ice-cold wine and my notepad – at the stern of the boat, as it sways gently like a cradle above the subtle and rhythmic waves. There is a beautiful, almost angelic, woman sitting on a small private harbour front. Earlier I sat on the edge of the port-side bow with my legs hanging down over the side, wearing my salt-encrusted, ragged, grey and black linen shirt, bought in Nepal, and daydreamed elaborate fantasies in which I, the handsome gentleman and protagonist, swam with athletic and confident ease to the shore of the beach, next to which the private promontory lies, and with cool grace struck up a casual conversation with the mysterious maiden of the coast and within my bizarre mind – which is irrevocably enthralled in unrealistic romanticism – I conjured a grand mythological tale of love and loss and self-sacrifice and holy yearnings and a depth of spirit known to a handful of ancient monks who dwelled like holy outcasts in reclusive caves in the wilderness, living as hermits and searching for the final meaning, the ultimate vision of life and sorrow and sacred ecstasy who, like me, were utterly lost in their own sad hallucinatory imaginings of the innumerable fantasies of existence.
I awake from my mournful reverie at the notice of a single, solemn tear rolling down my cheek, and I look out upon the old and weary rocks of the shore and see the orange hue of the setting sun illuminate the phosphorescent and glowing shades of the mysterious boulders and trees and sand and shallows of the coast, and I wonder if the woman of my dreams is as sad as she seems to appear on this eerily lonesome and hauntingly beauteous evening. Perhaps we are all as lost and sorrowful and terrified as one another, but the immense irrationality of our frail egos gives birth to the uncontrollable fear that we will never be able to reconcile our transcendent similarities of the human soul, and thus we are all damned to suffer the same fate in silence, alone and shivering in the dark of our minds.
Later on, after dinner, as the sea grew from wine-coloured to deep purple, bordering on ominous black – the cloudless sky rose from the horizon in a rich red, fading through orange and yellow, reaching a fabled pale blue, deepening towards navy blue until it finally arrives at dark blue; a shade that melancholically reminds me of Ophelia and the Sunday morning where we sat for hours talking and running our fingers sensually across each other’s bodies just a short walk down an idyllic country road and she said she felt like she was in a movie – all this a year or so after our tragic affair with youthful love – as we lay on our backs and looked up at the sublime summer sky and wondered of what could have been if we weren’t both so psychologically massacred and mutilated. Ah, what could have been.
Journal Extract by Stamos Mardou