Faceless meetings of respite

Faceless meetings of respite.
By Dilshan Boange


On a dark balcony of an uppermost storey of an apartment building facing and surrounded by similar structure sights, she puts her washing on a clothesline. She breathes in a lungful of air, imagining it is pristine and enjoyable. She is left to imagine her position in life as having its moments of niceness.

She has turned in to her room, where the computer sits on a large wooden desk, host to an array of articles which appear very much to be permanently residing upon the surface they lay. It is a cluttered desk; it is apt to be called so by one who knows, and keeps tidier. The screen is alight; it is her conduit for respite. She wants respite…
She can imagine, after all, only so far. She needs to know the material world isn’t void of some true satisfactions…





It is the last glass for the evening, he promises himself in an internal silence. The hand that holds a champagne flute works its many animations to please the faces of the crowd. The inescapable world. He is a hollow mannequin he tells himself with rerecorded instructions to perform. Smiles and laughs. Pensive movements of the eyebrows…
It is after all what he is, what he is about. It is his position in life.
The chandelier’s sparkles above him are just as strangulating as the laughter of the couple in conversation at him. Everything that surrounds him is suffocating. He has withdrawn inside, leaving his routine like, predictable reflexes and behaviour to work by itself. He does it often enough.

In a sea of people he is a man become alone. And imagining a moment of respite.



As the intensity of the evening subsides, and he is permitted to resign, he retreats with relief and life regenerating within. His feet hurry up a flight of marble steps and fly in to a room of velvet ground. The luxuries of the room, the richness of its air does not touch him.

The screen is lit, his conduit for respite. An LCD screen of the latest model and technology…he breathes anxious yet happy intakes of air.

In a common night of their life, when much of what defines the ordinary in each of their respective lives was at play, the multimillionaire investor who succeeded to a family legacy at thirty three and the spinster of sixty who guardians two orphaned nieces entrusted to her once upon a sad time by her dying widowed sister, met through the blessings of modern technology.

She was a pseudonym to him. He was a chat name to her. But both undressing the garb that hangs in definition of their places in the world, entered a mode of imagined and creative identities. To each other they came as words, sentences on a computer screen at a chat site. Through those words to the other, each shed skins and entered a bodiless realm where freedom in an unpriced commodity.

There they constructed to each other forms and figures, entire lives devoid of reality’s shackles.

And so with the benevolence of modern technology’s benefits they escaped their traps and fled to momentary respite in to comforting grips of another, who was words on a bright screen.


* * * * * * * * * *