The Spider Plant...

A spider plant sits on a bay windowsill in a quiet, off-street neighbourhood in West London. It gently sucks moisture from its little pot of earth, softly exhaling oxygen and quietly making sugar. It has little to worry about.

On the other side of the bay, a thirty-two year old man sits cross-legged in the natural darkness of an early Autumn Friday night, slowly lifting a glass of red wine to his lips. The smoke from his cigarette is drawn lazily through the open window by a warm and gentle breeze. Quiet music plays. Beat-driven but measured, gentle and thoughtful. A girl gets up from her place at the dining table and walks into the kitchen to refill her glass. The bottle rests beside him.

Two white, oval plates rest on the dining table. Three garden peas lay in a residual quantity of jus on his, and on hers a tender strip of fat from a rib-eye. Two candles flicker and their dancing flames are reflected in the glass tabletop, under which a teenage cat purrs as it sleeps.

Laughter from the neighbours and their guests drift into the room, lightly mixed with the scent of woodsmoke and flame-grilled meat. And as this sound, this smell, the taste of the wine on his lips, the flickering candles in the half light, the warmth of the room and the night air become his world in all the fullness of his experience, he rests the wine glass on his thigh, closes his eyes, smiles, and gently rests his head against the wall behind him.

The girl emerges from the kitchen, holding an unopened wine bottle. She approaches him in her own time, her eyes carefully scanning the room. Opening his eyes once more, he rolls his head to face her and watches as she moves toward him and finally comes to rest an inch from his knee. He takes the bottle of wine from her hand, rests it on the windowsill, and replaces it with is own hand, slipping his fingers through hers. He takes the open bottle from beside him and she accepts it with her left.

The spider plant sits with them, slowly sucking moisture from its little pot of earth, softly exhaling oxygen and quietly making sugar.

Giving...

A young couple are walking arm in arm on a glorious and lazy summer afternoon. As he speaks, he turns his head slightly to catch her reaction. She laughs and presses her cheek against his shoulder. She tilts her head up to meet his smile. Their eyes and not their necks do most of the work.

The sign above the cafe behind them reads "Pastais de Belem".

They are both in their late twenties, he stands at a proud six foot and two inches tall, well set, sensibly muscular with iconically Italian-American features and a deep brown and passionate gaze. She is slender, unreasonably attractive, Dutch with impecable English. They are the perfect couple, madly in love and the whole world madly in love with them. Beneath their perfect skin, of course, they are made of messy and falable biological material: blood and bone and sweat and shit. Hungry minds feed their greedy bellies.

As they walk past the entrance to the Pastais de Balem, an elderly woman leaves, stopping in the doorway for a second as she fastens the clasp of her purse. The opening door draws an aromatic flood of pastel de nata onto the street. Her feet stop walking and he is suprised, caught off guard, his body forced around by momentum, the falcrum of their linked arms and certain amount of curiosity. He faces her. His attention quickly pulls her into focus, but she does not meet him. Her gaze is fixed on a place and a time that no longer exist. She breaths deeply.

Another man, beautiful in his own way, once brought her to this place. He was much more in love with her than she ever was with him, but his love and his radiance led her to deny this for a long time. The same things led him to ignore it. Back when she was a small bundle of nervous smiles and unpublished photographs, barely out of her teens, he had called in favours and established new ones, pulled hours out of nowhere to bring her success into his own. His belief in her, and his hard work, had created this world that she now lived in. This confident smile, this dream of a life, this perfect honeymoon.

And when his drunken one-night-stand with a collegue at a christmas party had finally given her the excuse to finally feel what she had always felt, she had cried herself to sleep on his chest for twenty-seven nights before packing her bags. He had remained more or less motionless, emotionless for the whole period, stroking her hair and staring at the ceiling.

The Dutch girl's neck does all of the work as it lifts her eyes to meet the intrigue of the Italian-American man. She tells him that she loves him, and as she leads them into walking on, she momentarilly glances at the pastel de nata in the window, before fixing her eyes firmly on the horizon that faces them now.

Memory...

She bends down to pick her clothes off the floor of a cheap motel room in the city's downtown area. With a hurried sense of purpose and an aimless sense of direction, she covers the distance from item to item. Cross-legged from the bed, inward facing, his attention is caught by the sudden appearance of her reflection in the full-length mirror on the opposite wall, and he can see 360 degrees around a body that once had no concept of it's own nakedness but which subsequently learned to both fear and celebrate itself. Guiltily, he steals one last glance at that nakedness and his pupils dilate as his brain tries to imprint on itself every ray of light that bounces from her, so that it can keep their intimacy forever. This is the last thing he will ever take from her.

She catches his reflection in the mirror and she pushes a hard stare into his eyes for a fraction of a second before dropping her jeans on the floor and pulling her t-shirt over her head. She picks up the jeans and pulls them on, turning around to face him as she purposefully and mercilessly buttons the fly. She pushes the end of her belt through the buckle and pulls it tight. The muscles in her left forearm are taught as she pushes the prong into one of the fastening holes, and finally she pushes the loose end through the belt loop of her jeans, like she's securing the end of a good hitch. She fixes his gaze with shark-like eyes. That moment that he had tried to keep forever will leave here with her. It will walk out of the room and leave nothing but the empty haze of a memory. It will not keep him warm, it will not make him laugh and it will not want him or need him or love him or fuck him. And this is the last thing she will ever take from him.

Why am I here?

An appreciation of all life requires an abandonment of self. He needs second sight. Social life is a parade of friends and enemies, however loose those terms might be used - at the very least it is a wash or a spectrum of engagement and disengagement. Sometimes we are drawn into a dance, a flow of collective thoughts, ideas, laughter and gibberish. Dancers are always judged collectively. Other times we stand alone with others, animals sniffing each other and nothing flows. The id is a stagnant pool, the ego is trapped in a shell of mismatched language and ideas. Animals are always judged individually.

The abandonment of self requires an appreciation of all life. Our thoughts are more or less scheduled by the meanderings of our lives. We make plans and dream up dreams and solutions according to our situations and beliefs. Ideas outside of those realms seem unimportant. The thoughts about the self become the perception of self, and we become unable to live outside of those thoughts. Let our prescriptions go, and our heads are flooded with the thoughts and the lives of others. Because the mind has to have thoughts. From somewhere. From anywhere.

Maybe sex and meaning are separate. Maybe they only meet occasionally. Maybe the temporal biological imperative is seperate from the atemporal sensation of being that is our sense of self and spirit. Maybe that which is billed as the entwining of souls is, in fact, just the satisfaction of three billion years of chemical inclination. Maybe the soul is only a fraction of our existance.

He doesn't want it to be.

He sits on the couch of a stranger from a New York night club. She is fixing drinks and fixing herself. They danced a lot and talked very little. He sits there, eyes staring blankly at the floor, shifting left to right. Questions from his past, questions from his future, questions from the couch... what will he say when she comes back in? How will he ignite the sparks of passion and connection that will lead them upstairs? The taxi ride was virtually silent.

She comes back into the room, her hands full of drinks, her face full of nervous smiles, her body full of tension.

"Why am I here?" he asks.