There was a swift car that bustled down the street.

I found myself in front of a gigantic mall. I was delivering an order, pizza to this woman who was inside the mall. It’s crazy how she already has so many options to be comfortable!

Why did she live somewhere that isn’t air-conditioned?

I told you, humans are too much sometimes. But, I forgave her because she was a beauty. A beauty with nothing to be said and she gave me a tip. Tipping poor people was something else but tipping the next Bukowski was not good. Not good at all. It was the pettiness of my circumstances. Anyways, she was pretty.

I wanted to humbly request her to keep the change but I was held back by a thought. I cycled throughout the afternoon and got ready to attend a seminar held by this writer who was supposedly going to fill us all with great depth and findings, great sincerity, and great ambiguity regarding all of his secrets, findings, strengths, and weaknesses. All of that took him nowhere and only got him an audience who wanted to get nowhere.

What did I want at this moment?

I was to actually be a writer. I started to like something for the first time.

I wore the only pants I had and a simple yellow colour t-shirt. I combed my hair and sprinkled some powder that made me look like a sunflower surrounded by barren land.

Ahh well!

I walked with nothing on my mind and saw people, all coming out of their prayers from a mosque. All happy and chatting about their present days, and the days to come and the days that they don’t want to see and about the days that were already a distant memory and formulating some concept of existence with God as the epitome.

Ahh well.

I got inside a big auditorium of various seats all waiting patiently for people to fill them. All the people were outside the gate inside a smoking area, where packs of smokes were readily available for the thinking minds. It was like a party for people trying to attain their individual voices and who all had questions and these questions were haunting them.

They didn’t talk with each other much. It’s a writer thing, I thought, and I smoke my own cigarettes without talking much either. I liked it this way, a silent prayer to know whether it will be all worth it, whether the decision to suffer within myself will be all worth it, and whether it will be the thing that I was born for. It’s always the same fucking questions but they are all connected with this idea of success, an arrow that was already killing them for not making it.

These were all rich people with rich backgrounds. Fat wallets bulging out of their back pockets. There were no middle-class or poor folks waiting around in slums. I wanted to come across someone who blazed with the fire of wanting something more but everyone was an insecure ass. Big bellies still in their 20s and crying inside.

And we got in.

We were seated and all the empty chairs were taken; the race for the front seat was exemplary. They ran like they had never run before and just to be seen by the speaker. As usual, I took the back seat. Just far enough to listen to this fucker talk. And he was late, quite late, a busy man whatsoever in his schedule. Who enlightened the entire world with his words. And he came with his shiny suit that was made readily only for him, a skin-tight suit that could be worn when going for a swim.

It was that tight.

He had been taking care of himself to show the world was different and special but he didn’t interest me much. He had this old man's condescending aura that had his trauma all covered up. The world was good to him and so he became a good man in return for it. And everyone present there wanted to become like him. No one in the room had it in them to become a writer. All were touched by their own sufferings. I waited for him to speak.

He gave a welcome speech to make us all feel welcome. it was basically for him. For him to humble himself to write even more. All that Japanese culture of looking at his art as the saviour. But he had an articulated stance that made us all see pictures and thoughts. He saw the development towards a literary phase of letting new artists make their voices heard. He wanted to make India the same as the developed world, to open new gates for the upcoming new artists where the world is waiting for new art, and to sore through pages of obscure lines of sentences to make minds conditioned to write more obscure lines. But the world needed nothing more than a beer and a woman by its side.

That’s all.

He would have had a lot of sex with the English women. He was quiet about it though, real quiet about it, and made all noble statements which made the whole room all elevated with goodness. Then there was this Q and A. Everyone had the same question.

Do I have what it takes to be the next writer of the century?

Of course not, you can never be, have you seen yourself all pathetically desperate? You dumb fucks, you are less than the street beggar that took and took and only gravely died of not knowing the answer to the most simple question. You motherfuckers.

How much will I make if I become an artist?

They all wanted to stand on that stage to show their faces all but turned red with shyness. Like they knew it all along when they were a child. Like they were the chosen ones. Like the universe specifically made it this way so that their voices would be heard through the gates of hell and the symphonies of the divine. I laughed and thought of Jessica.

How was she? How was her father? Is he not dead by now, that old man still smoking cigars even though he had become a retard. Nicotine had such a hold on him.

Ahh, well.

The talk went on and I was too bored to even listen. The big secret was revealed shortly after.

I write 6 hours a day. I write and write and write and I masturbate after I write. It turns out all good when I stop writing and then I write some more and then I rewrite what I have written and rewrite some more until it all makes sense, the world I live in. Surely, you too can do this. It’s not easy, it’s hard work. Writing is hard work. You have to take your ass to the typewriter every day to be lucky and I got lucky but luck doesn’t have anything to do with it, I had hard work by my side.

He babbled a little more which made me tired and I got out, took a train ticket, and went out to a station which was named after an important person of his day.

Ahh, this motherfucker, too, was looking down on me.

I saw a park crowded with hugging people. Love was in the air. A body touched another body and both were happy just because they felt flesh touching flesh. Longine and weakness marred their otherwise lonely existence. I lay down all alone in the middle of all this romance and saw women. Their men looked at me all venomously. I was ready for a fight, just one hint and all hell could break lose.

Women and the world and the soul. And in them, you live for a few days and in them, one day, you die. In them, your lack of giving them your all makes it all the more pointless. It kills you to be inside a beauty that doesn’t call out for you.

It calls someone who exists in a dimension never touched before.

Amen.