mars bars, life and death by platonism

01Apr07

hollywood has explored near life experiences like nothing else has. and while cliches of tunnels with light at the end and life swimming before your eyes and black guys in white suits make for good cinematic experiences, i guess all of that is a load of crap. i know what death looks like, i’ve seen it. it looks like a refused mars bar. 

i turned down a mars bar in january 2005 when i had a malarial fever in the range of 102 to 106 for a continuous four days. karachi was having its coldest winter in recent history and i lay in bed, shivering, sometimes thinking i wasn’t ready to die; at other times praying god would put me out of my misery. for two days i refused to go to an emergency room because i wanted to die at home but my family eventually dragged me to hospital when i entered a nearly delirious state and broke into tears at the sound of my sister’s voice on the phone. i was having my long forgotten nightmares again. dreams of the smell of burning flesh and empty cities and highways littered with corpses. of collapsed mineshafts and being buried alive. a worried friend offered me the mars bar, trying to coax me into getting something down my throat. ironically, that was the moment of greatest despair. if i could no longer even attempt to have chocolate i knew i was going to die. but the fever eventually dissipated and i was back at work on the sixth day wondering why i had been worried in the first place.

two years before that i had turned down another mars bar. i was so badly shaken up at the time that i actually didn’t eat the whole day. imagine being in a room with one of your best friends going through some files. then imagine the window panes shattering, the ceiling coming down, bits of smashed tubelights and broken airconditioning pipes glancing past your shoulder and the shock wave and heat from the bomb literally forcing your eyes closed for an instant. neither the stud nor i sat near a window for days.

i turned down another mars bar last night. no drama though. no bits of glass and cement and no deadly bacteria either. death isn’t necessarily the end of life after all. its merely the end of one of the million possible possible paths fate could take you down as you live your life. we die several times a second, a hundred times with every breath. the only thing is we hardly ever notice it. but hardly ever, close as it may be, is not never. and so we’re sometimes left mourning and yearning and hurting for what could have been, should have been, but won’t.

a simple you know our relationship will never be anything but platonic, don’t you? can do it. there was a reciprocal why? on the tip of my tongue but self respect forced out a quietly nodded yes as a million possible futures, a million dreams, a million hopes all went up in smoke.

it’s enough to make you turn down a mars bar anyway.

Filed under: fudge, ramble, the sweet stench of life   |  58 Comments