You’re the only man I know who still drives a Gypsy. You’ve had it for years, I can tell, and like your body, it’s beginning to deteriorate. The lining of the seats are wearing thin, the rear-view mirror on the left of the dashboard has come off and refuses to be reattached, the engine growls when the wheels are in motion like a restless chest-beating rebel, and the carburetor throws more tantrums than a bratty five-year-old boy. It’s not like you can’t afford a brand new car. But you’re too attached to this machine and I can’t blame you, it’s a gorgeous beast with a masculine guile.
Anyone else would have given up by now. It’s exhausting to have to pull over in the afternoon heat or amidst peak hour traffic to open the hood and bang the carburetor with a spanner until it is disciplined into submission so you can be on your way.
“Can’t you replace the carburetor?” I asked one day.
“I could. But I’d rather get it fixed,” you said.
“So why haven’t you got it fixed?” I asked.
“Because no mechanic seems to remember how to,” you mumbled. “That’s the thing about the time we’re living in. We’ve forgotten how to repair things, we prefer to replace them instead, get new parts in exchange for the old.”
I once had a lover who was too callous with everyday things. His bed was always unmade, his room always seemed like a hurricane had thrown up on the floor. His books were always dusty, his clothes were strewn around, and his kitchen sink was always spilling over with dishes. He had a penchant for misplacing things. He was so clumsy with his fingers he once ripped a five-hundred-rupee note, accidentally, while fishing it out from his wallet to pay the bill at a restaurant.
He was a writer too. So I forgave him his inadequacies, treated them as quirks, as eccentricities. But I always knew I could never be with him beyond the present tense. It isn’t wise to give your heart to a man with butter fingers.
But you are graceful with your fingers. There’s poetry in the way you stroke your beard while your driving, the way you sign against your prints, the way you hold a knife, the way you adjust your lens and shoot.
You refuse to give up on things, carburetors, water heaters, air conditioners, amplifiers, crusty ceilings and sun-baked walls. As long as there is an ounce of life within these things, or even the promise of resurrection, you refuse to abandon them. You hoard them, instead, preserve them in boxes or in your attic until you have the chance to fix them, renew their lease on life.
Five days since you went silent on me. I tell myself I should move on, relinquish you and the ghost of you that’s so embedded in my being. That perhaps this was our expiry date and the contents of our relationship have gone rancid.
Are we really beyond repair?
