Beauty: the other side explored...
(A Story...)

Love, with all its grandiose frills and laces intact, is a virtue highly over-rated, while raw, undiluted hatred is a dying art! Enveloped in the sheer magnificence of our mutual abhorrence we, he and I sought our refuge in the very chasm that separated us. The common wound we shared became our bulwark against the obsolete notions of beauty the world boasts of.
Beauty.
What would they know of beauty!

It was the scorching mid-noon of May. The sweat dripping down my brow tasted salty-sour. The crow perched upon the bruised moaning hedge looked about the solitary street expectantly. The confluence of gray and black on its body seemed to echo my own subliminal inkling. Standing on the doorway, I waited for a lost whirlwind to take me home!

He entered, his limping gait only accentuating his masculinity. The door hinges let out a sigh of relief as he pushed it open. A swarthy face topped with few dying tufts here and there. Eyes narrowed down to mere slits, that’s how he’d looked down at me. For the first time? We could never agree on that….

AIDS is a beautiful word. AID. To aid. To aid oneself on one’s way to salvation. That’s precisely what AIDS did to us. It was our very own gold and blue passport to the realm of Hades…Hades where in his words, “catharsis is the way of life”!

Now, as I look back at that fateful noon, that scorching May noon, it was the synopsis of my whole life. Immersed in the serene repugnance for each other, we salvaged each other by composing an elegy out of our union. Few bumps on the way, and we were almost there. Hades was reaching out for us. Finally, we were Home….

Today as we lay in each other’s arms, unable to shoo away the rodents nibbling at our wounds, we can’t help but pity at the world beyond this bordering fence. Our withered bodies slumped over each other, we smell the urine accumulated over the months in that faraway corner of the room. And it’s beautiful. We lick the floor for the days-old crumbs of bread. And it’s beautiful. Outcast, forlorn, dejected. Us? No!
We have merely loosened ourselves, surrendered ourselves to a state of boundless ecstasy while this world and its inhabitants are still bound up with a perennial sensation of foreboding. Their loss!
They hand down ‘Love’ pamphlets framed with too many do’s and don’ts while we hate uninhibited.
We live emotions while they count the days.

One last kiss. The pent up vigor of our bodies acts as the winepress. The red wine gushes out through my lips. It tastes salty-sour. We close our eyes, “Ah, the beauty of it all...”