Fiction: My Great Escape, Writing: My Sweet Torment

You know, that famous line that goes Books Are Your Best Friends? Never quite got that one. My books have never been my best friends. Hell, no. I can never say I even know my favourite books. I can't even say I have favourite books; just books that refuse to leave me. Is that an apt description for a best friend? Dunno.

I think my books, they've left me with fleeting but intense moments, like intimate conversations with strangers on busrides. Touch and go, but stay in memories. Revisit, as deja vu, as glitch in my Matrix-syncd world. Morph and mutate, like the creature who lives inside the splinter in my brain.

There've been episodes when books have saved me from murdering people; there've been moments when they've plunged my PMS-y mood down-down-down with malicious delight; there've been so many passages that've made me love like I have never loved (and maybe can't possibly) in the life outside the covers of a book. But the ones I love the most are the moments when the tangible world wrapped around me as I hold a book in my hands and read, melts and dissolves and expands a wee bit, because something I've just read has sent warm and fuzzy feelings from labrynthine brain depths to goose pimple surfaces. I could be anywhere: propped against a pillow/ feet tucked under the bum, into the razai/ knees hugged to chest/ lying on tummy/ miss-slutty-legs-on-the-desk. But I'd be a swirling wobbly bubble for a bit: my eyes wide, ears cottonwoolly, the back of my throat aching with strange, crazy desire. That's my high from reading. Like being in love for the first time (now if only I could remember what that was like when it happened in real life).

It's also my great escape, when I need to shut the book and face life. I've often cheated myself and resorted to the axiom that the best way to deal with people is to watch them as if they're fictional characters. It makes you suddenly indulgent, interested in background histories, and hesitant to judge - the three things you could hardly bring yourself to be interested in otherwise. There's that meditative quality of feeling once-removed from yourself, and so you can have any number of conversations with that person without letting him get under your skin. And to think you don't need to walk away with the perverse pleasure of knowing that your characters have no idea of what you've done to them; I can just sit right there and revel in the cruelty.

I guess that's what I love about fiction. It's by definition, non-documentary, construed, artificial, but it lets me be myself, warts and all. I can be selfish. I can say I want, I want, endlessly. I can make some really idiotic, all-wrong choices. I can be a quicksand madness of narcissistic delight. I can be... oh well, I can assume that I can be.

But when I have to write, and I live with this even as I type, I'm not so sure anymore. Every word is like taking a raging bull by the horns. I move this way and that, dig my heels in and not let the word toss me about. I struggle to remember, to remember what I said aloud in my head before I sat down to type. And till the very last day that I read my writings, I will be in this very moment, tweaking and tinkering and tearing my hair apart about how the right words aren't falling into the right place. And always getting a vaccuum tummy, a niggling sinking feeling that I'm nowhere to be found amidst these words. Nowhere in totality. No epiphanic glimpse. Only fragments I know too well from life anyway.

In writing, I have no escape. Not even when it's fiction I write. It's still pleasurable torment, this wrestling with making-and-becoming. But sometimes I wish it wasn't so unceasing. Or that I would get tired someday I decide to just stop writing. Or that I will someday wholeheartedly start loving this mad process like a sado-masochistic lunatic.

Till then, there's this space between reading and writing, dreaming and waking. I think, for the moment, I call it life.