Diary of a Madman, XIX

As he made sense of the situation, a strange pulling ache flushed over him. It was like the insistent tugging of a small child inside of his heart. He was invited to a small dinner party at a friend's house. It wasn't anything spectacular, this dinner party. The music dwelt on classic rock that hardly fit the mood. The moment he arrived, the fellows with whom he arrived split into respective groups of comfort. The attendants split into their cliques and the room shattered into multiple people speaking at once and no one really listening. It was the first time that he'd break away from his studies to engage in some kind of a social activity, so he felt particularly well-groomed that day. He had a olive green turtle-neck under a brown herringbone blazer. His chinos were fine-pressed, as he enjoyed ironing his clothing to dwell over his thoughts. Like a steady stream of water, he would flood over his thoughts and explore them in a fluid curiosity as he pressed out each wrinkle in his clothing.

When he arrived, he took the time to greet familiar faces and ask a round of general questions regarding health, weather, and news. He was rather skilled at these conversations since there was a certain obligatory nature to them. In spite of the rushing bustle of the technological generation, it seems that these minute conversations were gradually growing in length.

His mind, however, was not with the conversations he was currently having, rather, was at the other side of the room, where an attractive young woman stood, deeply pondering an entirely generic reproduction of Magritte's Les Empire des Lumiere VII, whose placement at that wall in that particular apartment was mysterious of itself.

She was slender, which was more pronounced by the way she tied her hair back. She wore a skirt of a pastel brown that stopped just before her knees. It matched with a black wool sports coat. She finished the outfit with a dark reddish pair of stilettos. She would occasionally tilt her head from one side to the other, as if she were decoding the fundamental secrets of the universe by gazing at the cheaply reproduced colors of the print.

Though he had no idea of how this woman looked or any notion of her age, he felt a powerful gravitation that, to him, had a stalwart vacuum effect on his soul. He felt the boundaries of his amorphous essence blur and bend to the unrequited chemistry that this one-sided interaction to which her pure form, her sheer idea, was catalyst. She added a new aspect to his very existence.

He felt a stuffy desire fog his core. For some reason, that woman became the very weight that became the centre for this entire universe. Yet, he felt an insufferable distance stretched between them. For some inexplicable reason, he knew that they would never meet. He would leave without knowing her name and he would never ask what about that very plain print she find so fascinating.

Two hours later, two hours that seemed like a mere shade of a minute, he watched her leave the apartment with a friend. In her absence, she left an extended presence in his mind that sunk into him like a cruel, slow-acting insidious poison.