Started reading another story by Murakami. Damn that’s tragic. Depressing. Makes you want to cry and break down and cry some more. Some time later, drove out. Bought a pack of cigarettes. Took me some time to find out a shop that was open and selling cigarettes. Strange? Yeah, I know. Finally found this man standing at the door of his house way down this ripped street that ran like a wounded snake through old tent-like buildings and roof-less houses. He was standing at his door when I stopped my motorcycle right in front. ‘What ya want, man?’ He asked looking at me. ‘A pack of cigarettes,’ I replied. ‘Anything else?’ ‘No that will be all,’ I replied. He went inside his home wearing his white soiled vest and brown trousers, and returned with a pack of cigarettes all sealed and neat looking like a diamond thrown down from the sky by the devil itself. I took the cigarette pack, stuffed in the pocket of my pyjamas, paid him and drove back
And at one point in the story came this line “There’ nothing worth getting in this world that you can get easily.” I stopped right there after reading the line, and thought about it. I had already smoked two cigarettes and suddenly I wanted to light a third one. Some good old morning blues was playing on my speakers continuously since morning. I finished reading that story, got up from my chair, took a piss and walked out of the door thinking about all that I had just finished reading. So good and so moving and so full of the silent tragedy in our lives.
But while I got up and I was walking to the toilet, a number of thoughts crossed my mind. The way he wrote that story. The way I write things. There’s no use of tough words to write something beautiful and readable. I have always believed in that. Always. My focus is more on the formation of the whole sentence. I want no extra word in there. I want no word less either. Just the right amount of words and I somehow feel it inside me when I get those right amount of words and I somehow know it when my sentence feels complete and right. My focus is on forming such sentences that can reach somebody’s spirit without minimal obstruction. I do not write for the mind. Academicians and intellectuals and philosophers are doing a great job at it and they are doing a better job at it than I ever will. Mind is a terrible terrible place. Took me a lot of years to get to this understanding. Mind of a scientist, a beggar, a teacher, a poet, a retail seller, a chain smoker, a sweeper, a yogi, a lunatic. All minds are terrible, and so I am never concerned with them. I prefer to keep myself away from all minds as much as possible.
Lit my third cigarette of the day. Never owned an ashtray. Never used a thing meant for the sole purpose of that thing. My bowl is my ashtray now. Thinking about reading another story. Thinking about masturbating. Thinking about lighting another cigarette. Thinking about playing some goddamn blues again. Thinking. It’s night already. Crazy! Never thought that another night wold come, and now look at it. It came just like that.
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