Riding Streetcars

Dear Blanche,

I got your letter just a while back. I have dispatched a cruise ticket to help you sail all the way upto the Caribes. I'll be meeting you there! Don't get distracted while sailing past Bahamas, those sailors have a penchant for playing with people's emotions.

It was so, how should i describe it, so nerve wracking to receive a letter from you. I heard your husband shot himself some months back. But the person who gave me the news, he was gay. He spoke longingly about your husband. And at one point, he broke down and cursed you for your husband's death. He asked me to pass on this letter to you. Said it was meant for you, when you were putting up at Hotel Flamingo.

Sweet dreams till sunbeams find you
Sweet dreams that leave all worries behind you
But in your dreams whatever they be
Dream a little dream of me

Yes, dream a little dream of me

I crave for your attention.

Its not that you arr attractive but all my heart grew active when you came into view..

I crave for your attention more so, when I realize that you systematically, unconsciously, treat me as a person without significance.

I  stopped talking with him and that's why I have not been talking with anybody over the past few weeks..

Where does that leave me? As nobody? Do you just pick up your receiver to talk to a dial tone which soon grows dead? Do you talk to a receiver then? A receptacle, like a jug your pour water into when you have no better use for it or you cant drink it. I wonder. How you manage to do what only Enlightenment thinkers did with such aplomb. Obliterating a person's significance, his individuality, his desire to be wanted. Yes, desire and some answered questions. Thats where this hallucination started. Some months back. Or maybe some 9 years back.

Whenever I return home these days, a home where i live with my family and not alone, I realize I have no one apart from my family.

Well, you know, it could have been much worse.

Ah yes, what did that night yield to us? An evaluation of a pair? As to who is a good human being and who is not? The guilt function had one positive effect, it erased all possibilities of a weakness. The bad effect, the nullification of an identity to a sub-zero level. I am reading all the meanings I want to read, into a pretty simple situation among three drunk people. But i learnt that from you. What did I learn from you?

When we maximize our potential to desire, we effectively rewrite the meaning of the past, the present and the future. For ourselves. for people who are trying to connect with us.

But who am I to infer maxims from your life, Blanche DuBois? After all, we are so alike in the way we selectively choose to tell our stories, erasing out our ugly deeds and smoothening out those reckless desires which we couldn't reciprocate. Both of us have found comfort in the company of strangers.

All our conversations are forced. They have to be forced because we aren't really attracted to each other. We are each other's compromise. You, being the Tarantula, always have new victims in the waiting. New people to chase and get over once the chase is over, because even our desires turn out to be flawed creatures. Inflexible mostly. They leave us, isn't that what we conclude. Isn't that what i wanted to conclude about us as well? That you left me?

No.

I didn't conclude that. We were never together in the first place. I miss those 11-4 conversations when we sang paper moon together, for 3 months 2 days, 1 year 4 months or 5 years and a semester.

The world's a temporary parking place

A bubble for a minute

You smile, the bubble has a rainbow in it

Say, its only a paper moon

Sailing over a cardboard sea

But it wouldn't be make-believe

If you believed in me

Yes, it's only a canvas sky

Hanging over a muslin tree

But it wouldn't be make-believe

If you believed in me

Without your love

It's a honky-tonk parade

Without your love

It's a melody played in a penny arcade

It's a Barnum and Bailey world

Just as phony as it can be

But it wouldn't be make-believe

If you believed in me

Our conversations never ended. I just grew quiet. I wont talk unless you feel that you need to talk to me, not as a substitute for your desires.

I really share nothing in common with you. Your sibling was wrong. I am not anyone's part 2. I am me.

That's why, sometimes I regret asking certain questions. I step back, I say sorry without explaining my apology. I really have no right to ask you any question. You underline it everyday, that I am a nobody for you.  

I don't know where this is coming from, but the man looked troubled and underslept. Guess he still cant get over the death of his homosexual lover :P

See you soon,

Love

Your college sweetheart,

Shep Huntleigh.