Why, Georgia Why

Am I living it right

Am I living it right

Why Georgia Why

Why Georgia Why, John Mayer.

He kept driving by himself on the lonely highway as the evening sun was about to disappear. He wanted to reach to the self-serviced apartment before the sun set so he stepped up the accelerator. His playlist was a mix of Neil Diamond John Mayer Elton John and Deep Purple. The songs seemed to echo his current frame of mind that evening. He was lost in thoughts of the past as he drove along. 

The traffic which was luckily conspicuous by its absence almost the whole journey began to make its presence felt as he approached the big city. The homeward bound office traffic slowed his speed down considerably as he began to look for important landmarks he had noted down in his diary to help him reach his destination. Even in this era of GPS navigation he relied on his old school comforts. The big bank followed the second hand book store and then take a left turn at the roundabout, he muttered to himself as he drove on. He almost seemed to know where he was going, he had read the directions so many times. He finally reached the apartment almost simultaneously as the city lights came on that July evening.

He parked his car in the designated car park for his apartment and carried his duffle bag as he headed towards what would be his home for the next couple of weeks. His salt and pepper hair yet couldnt age his boyish face. He was touching 45 but looked at least 10 years younger. Only a slight paunch was making its presence felt gradually in his otherwise lanky frame. As always he had a light blue denim shirt and dark blue jeans. Denim was like his second love.

As he stood outside the apartment he tried to remember the lock combination number to take the key out to enter the apartment. He didn’t see the number written down on his phone. He wanted to see if he could remember it. He muttered it underneath his breath a couple of times, his eyes shut as he did so. Then he pressed the combination and his face lit up with a smile as the lock opened, enabling him to pull the key out and use it to enter the flat.

The living room looked nice and cosy. There was a brown sofa set which took up almost half the space of the room. There was a passage leading to a door to the only bedroom the apartment had. On the other side of the sofa was a wall unit which had books neatly organised. There was a bay window behind the sofa overlooking city centre. He was lost in his thoughts of the past as he sat down as he sat down on the upholstered sofa. Her words kept playing inside his head as he leaned back and shut his eyes.

“You don’t get to choose who you love. You can choose who you want to build your life with. Or choose to work to keep your love alive. But you simply don’t get to choose who you love. It’s just one of those beautifully random poetic aspects of life which just happens to you. You don’t have any say in it.”

She had said these words to him as she walked out of his life that fateful evening. He was left speechless as he saw her slender frame walk away from him against the backdrop of the setting sun. The finality of her tone made him realise he had lost her forever.

His marriage was well and truly on the rocks when he met her. She was recovering from her break up with her fiance. So it was a perfect meeting for the two of them. It was their common love for literature that drew them towards one another. His Robert Frost would complement her Emily Dickinson perfectly as they synced together in a beautiful harmony of words, music and sounds of the soul. It was magical the way they bonded. They even called each other by those names…Robert and Emily. They sat together on the corner table of the little cafe as they discussed poetry cinema and politics passionately. Conversation flowed as freely as their love for one another. They spent a lot of time together those days.

He felt alive being with her. He wanted to make things alright in his life and set the wheels in motion all over again. And one of the first things he did was to work on hit breaking marriage. He loved his wife and didn’t know how and when the rot had set in between them. They didn’t make love, they didn’t speak, they didn’t even scream and fight. There was a complete lack of of communication between. And now he wanted to change that. He realised that one of them needed to take the first step in rebuilding the relationship and he was willing to be one to make the first move. He loved his wife and wanted to get back to being with her how he used to be, in the early days of their marriage. And in a sad ironic way, he had to thank Emily for that.

The fights and disagreements started increasing between him and Emily by the day. Inexplicably he found himself more and more disconnected from her. The talks on poetry and the arts bored him, some of her life views irked him. He began to find her loud and tiresome. He didn’t look forward to their meetings at the cafe. He started avoiding her calls and made excuses for not meeting up. At times he didn’t even call her back after not picking her phone cup. He remembered the lines from the Bruce Springsteen song “nobody knows honey, where love goes, but when it goes it’s gone gone”. He felt as if those lines were almost written for him. He knew it was time up for the Robert Emily chapter in his life.

Despite all his efforts, his marriage didn’t survive. His wife was too far removed from him and wanted her freedom. I am tired of being your second priority any longer. When you learn to look beyond yourself and your own emotional needs maybe you can look for me, but maybe by then I will be long gone. And she was indeed long gone from his life by the time he did look for her.

The same Springsteen song haunted him that evening as he rested on the brown sofa. “When you’re alone, you’re alone. When you’re alone you’re nothing but alone”, Springsteen sang and everytime he sang, those lines stabbed him on the chest like a steely knife.

Dusk had long set in and the sun had said its final goodbye for the day, as he compared it to the darkness inside him. The neons had lit up on the streets below and he turned himself on the sofa to gaze down on the busy city traffic. His mind was mind and his eyes stared vacantly the noisy, moving stream of cars. Driven by people to go home from their work places. Home to their respective spouses. And their families. He wondered as he stared blankly at the cars.

He didn’t realise when his eyes shut, lying on the sofa. The room was dark as he wasn’t awake to go and switch on the lights. What he also didn’t know was that he would never wake up from the sleep he had gone in to. There was a strange calm on his face as he lay on the brown sofa, still. His phone was clutched to his hand and John Mayer was singing Why, Georgia Why on his selected playlist. The last number dialled on his phone was his wife’s.

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