a nose-less rock (Story)

It was an endearing dusk, and I could feel all the colors – blue, purple, orange, red, yellow hugging the ocean far away. If someone forced me to point at one of the colors, perhaps I would be terribly incapable. And yet – I could feel all of them.

“Isn’t it beautiful?”, Komal whispered.

“So beautiful I would want to die right now”, I replied exuberantly with my heartbeat clinging to my legs.

“Isn’t that strange?”, he said.

“Not at all. Imagine this is the last thing you see before you die!”, I replied.

“Petty animal, dying for meaning”, Komal smirked, and we laughed.

It was getting darker, and it was a new city. We heard a train zooming by, spitting ugly mechanical sound of humming, before stopping in the nearby train stop. In a minute, the train screamed with a high-pitched wail, and zoomed out into oblivion. The only way to get to the other side of the road was to find an exact gap of time when there were no trains. So, we held hands, and ran across the train track as soon as possible. We had to reach Andrew’s before it was too late.

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When we reached Andrew’s, darkness had already seeped into his house. The yellow light bulb right at the entrance greeted us inside. The hot summer was definitely leaving a mark, the fan in the living room swiveled with pain, round and round. His room smelled of Colombo, of concrete, of the nearby ocean and of Kottu – which I was starting to like very much. But we did not have much time; we got a TukTuk, and headed to the Airbnb John was staying in.

When we reached the place, everyone was pouring themselves drinks. “I don’t drink anymore.”, Komal said. He held a bottle of water, while everyone reached for plastic cups that could barely hold the cheap wine we could afford. He muttered to himself that it was “suffocating in here like a mouse just died” and opened the nearby window. “How much does this place cost, John? All these hundred storied big buildings are earning like crazy, aren’t they?” someone said in the background. I was tired from the day, so the nearby sofa pulled me on its top. I immediately felt as if I crashed into something flat, and hard. When I grabbed the flat, hard object, it turned out to be a miniature compact mirror. I felt the mirror in my hand amused at how weird it looked to me – rectangular, and small, and yet when I looked at its silvery surface, it made me seem so deep, and so large. It was when I realized that I had never owned a compact mirror in my entire life.

“Fuck”, I muttered, looking at John, “nearly broke your tiny mirror”.

“Don’t worry, it’s been moving around crazy, it deserves it”, said John. I gave him a quick chuckle. I held the miniature mirror in my lap. We all went back to drinking again.

“So, why don’t you drink anymore?” Andrew asked Komal, astonished to hear he had stopped drinking.

“Staying away from my addiction”, Komal replied, rubbing his beard. Everyone sipped their wine, and nodded along, except Ayyub.

“Complete pretension of agency to claim you could control it”, Ayyub said, “only if addiction worked that way!”

“Duffer”, Pasindu smirked at Ayyub, to which Ayyub raised the back of his palm, and lowered all other fingers except his middle one. For some time, the middle finger hung in the air in confusion. When people stopped looking at it, his palm went to grab his wine cup.

I extended my own hands, and grabbed my wine. As I was taking a few sips, a weird curiosity caught hold of me: I held the mirror from my lap up to my face, and stared directly into the soul of the mirror. I shrieked hard, and started screaming as soon as I looked at my own ghostly face.

“Guys, my nose!”, I shrieked. Everyone looked at me suddenly and the line of sight from each person converged right above my mouth, where my slightly pointed, turned up nose was supposed to be. “Where is my nose!”, I shouted again.

Everyone’s eyes went back to their wine glass, and they started drinking their wine again, heeding no concern to the fact that I had lost my entire nose. I started shaking my head, and touching my face, in the hope that I might stumble across my lost nose, so I could grab it by its nostrils, and put it back in its place. My face wrinkled, and I cringed, trying together with my fingers to find my nose. The place where I was supposed to have my nose had a smooth layer of skin – my whole body shivered when I rubbed across it. All in vain. My nose was nowhere to be seen or felt.

The fan sped up again. My body was drenched in sweat, and my lungs were asking for more air. I sipped the cup with wine as fast as possible to let myself suck in air through my mouth. At one point, my body felt like a big sneeze. While my air pipe contracted to let my sneeze get out of where my nose was supposed to be, the skin around it pulsated.

“Guys, how do I sneeze now!”, I shouted again, to which nobody replied. Komal stared at me for a while, but he joined others soon in watching Sesath and Andrew wrestle each other in jiu-jitsu in John’s bed. “Sex fight! Sex fight!”, shouted Komal, drinking the water from his bottle, clearly only the one except me who was not still drunk.

My hands clasped each other – so much so my knuckles hurt. In a while, my desire to sneeze faded away, but I gasped for air more and more, so at this point I had my mouth open as wide as possible. I was still drinking a little, occasionally sipping a few gulps, and getting back to widening my mouth as soon as possible.

I was quite frustrated at everybody for not noticing that I had lost my nose. “At least Voldemort had nostrils”, I unconsciously smiled, touching the smooth skin where my nose was supposed to be. Luckily, Ayyub came to me and asked me what was happening.

“I don’t have a freaking nose, can you not fucking see!” My frustration was palpable.

“So what do you have in the place of your nose?” he asked

“Nothing, I have nothing, when there should have been a beautiful nose”, I almost shouted. My diaphragm twitched all of a sudden, and a sour current ran through my body. My teeth were sour, the friction from my socks stung deep into my skin, and my clothes rubbed over my body.

“You know nothingness doesn’t exist, right? It is just a construct of human consciousness”, Ayyub said to me. I did not reply. I was stretching my body to stop my diaphragm from twitching, all the while keeping my mouth wide open to keep on breathing.

“Jean Paul Sartre talks of how nothingness comes out of human consciousness, and its concerns. Imagine you go to a restaurant, and search for your friend Uday, but you cannot find him anywhere. Universe can only tell you what exists – the table, the chair, the people. There is no Uday in the restaurant, and yet the universe cannot express the absence of Uday. The nothingness of Uday in the restaurant comes from your concern at the absence of Uday”, Ayyub said in a long monologue, as if he was starting a boring paper for his philosophy class.

I had started breathing heavily even before he had stopped his monologue. The AC fan started whirring faster. My brain begged for a moment of clarity. But the opposite happened, the brain fog inside my head started getting worse and worse.

“But the absence of my nose, isn’t that nothing?” I rested my fingers on my head. It was spinning. I deduced it was the lack of Oxygen. My throat was gnawing – almost begging for clean filtered air through my nostrils that did not exist anymore. The group had moved to a new theatre – Andrew was now squatting Hamza, while Hamza clinged to his shoulders, and everybody gathered around to count the number of reps Andrew could hit in one go.

“Exactly. It is nothing. Except the universe doesn’t recognize it. It is only recognized by what concerns consciousness.”, Ayyub chuckled this time, “and that my friend is what sets you free – this power of negation which your consciousness possesses.”

I dug my fingernails into my skin, unable to comprehend what was happening.

“Think of what you could be because you can negate, while the universe cannot – isn’t that great?” Ayyub went on. It was dizzying, and I could not listen to him anymore, for if I did I would probably throw up right there, and die of asphyxiation.

“Stop”, I pleaded “no more please!”.

He nodded slightly, smiled a little, and went to the group. I sat down on the couch. Freedom. Freedom, and Possibility. A cold wind blew my hair in the other direction. Somebody had opened the window, I noticed. I went near the window and peeked outside. The city was colored in lights. The roads were stretched like a thread with colorful LEDs. I went to the balcony for more air, while the group became just a cacophony. Was I free, and my nose – its absence, precisely – a testament to that freedom? I looked down from the balcony, and my heart shuddered with the depth of the space between me and the ground. In a minute, my noseless body was swinging down the building towards the ground, until I smashed on the ground and my brain fell out of my head cavity. For a second when I was falling down, I did not move, I floated. For a moment, I was a nose-less rock. And it was the freest I had ever felt. Precisely the lack of possibility, the absence of the sense of nothingness.