(unfinished)

Cyrus lived in a quiet seaside town, rather dreary and modestly sized. If you happened to live in one of those classy houses that faced the ocean, you’d have the morning wind wafting the sweet smell of the sea –of fish and salt – through your window. On the middling stretch of sand, dog walkers, joggers, and people lonely with their thoughts savored those rare hours when the gloom and quiet of night were done with and the day hadn’t sunk too much into the chaos and clutter of noises, arguments, idle conversations. Those were surreal, fantastic hours. Even more so, since a few hours after, while driving one’s car or running to catch the bus, one would catch a glimpse of that beach again. Only by then everything would be much too vivid – vulgar, almost – the way metal surfaces glint under the sun, the women selling their bhajis and sundal, the way fish catchers bent over their nets, dragging to shore countless gleaming fish. It was impossible to genuinely feel anything. Things were too flamboyant for one to be melancholic, too factual to feel anything close to delight.

Cyrus considered getting himself a dog. The beach was well enough. There was something intensely private during those quiet hours of early morning. Something like memory, to be basked in undisturbed. Even though in the last couple of days, his joy of walking had been fairly marred by a group of middle-aged men who had taken their yoga exercises, in his opinion, to a dangerously serious level. He thought it a violation of privacy. Why couldn’t they find a quiet patch of ground somewhere?

The problem was that he had this thing about speaking to himself -- which sort of alarmed people. Getting a dog would be an attempt at appeasement. But more than that, perhaps. Animals, they said, make good companions. A magazine, was it? An article on how effective the acquisition of pets is to dispel loneliness. The small person in Cyrus’s mind laughed at the thought. Maybe, though, there was no reason to be so skeptical. There were men who scoured the beach with their bitches, looking content, as if in complete possession of love. And maybe they were – such is the nature of bitches.

Recently, he had moved his computer to the living room, installing it before the window that opened directly towards the beach. It was meant to make him feel that the room extended all the way to the beach, to sea. He had blamed his study for his incapacity to write; it made him feel all cooped up. He could’ve sworn he had seen pores on the wall, cracking from the heat. The prospect of the shift had thrilled him a little, but it didn’t do much. The wind buoyed him, certainly, but he was as dry as ever. Everything he wrote was something that had been written before, somewhere else; another person, another time.

The other morning he switched off his computer with a potent feeling of impotency. The beastly thing about living alone, he thought, is that your thoughts, your fears – hell, even your impotency – didn’t matter. There was nobody to respond to any of those, nobody to challenge them. What he did, then, on the second week of feeling impotent – which by extension made him feel incompetent – was to go to the toilet and kicked a bucket.