A Writing in Scarlet

It's a shame that happiness doesn't drive me mad with a desire to stain paper or digital screens, virgin desks or blackboards. A shame, really, that my hands were never the perpetrators of vulgar love on walls in stinking toilets. It has always been pain, or despair, sadness or loneliness. So, how hard can it be to scribble something intelligible in a happy march evening, when the scarlet of the sun, the scarlet of the pomegranate leaves, the scarlet of the million tiny flowers is still fresh in my mind from a weekend getaway.

Times of relative happiness are dangerous because when they end they leave you with no clue as to how to handle the change. The scarlet will fade, what will remain and become prominent is the discoloured mess of unattended milk from the previous night. The sweet smell of the leaking garbage bag will wake me up in the morning, the rush of a responsible existence will absorb me; and at night I'll wonder how it used to be like to forget the world at the scarlet of an icy mountain cap. Everyday chores will give me a sense of ultimate purposelessness, and the painful situatedness will make the tiniest diversion from a schedule an escapade.

Somehow, such days are when I can muster up the patience to let the thoughts flow in one direction, to survey, evaluate, and assemble them and hope they form a coherent structure. On such days the need to express becomes the most important of all human desires, to mark the passing of that stretch of time. The paper screams in agony to be read, as if raging against the harsh temporality of all things cosmic.

Today is not such a day. Today Ed Sheeran has taken the charts by storm. Today the trash can is empty.