Like repeat offenders they come, spreading like a spilled ink, leaving stains
behind – harmless but annoying. Please rate our services, they would ask:
How was the food? Excellent, very good, good, fair, bad. All of the above?
How was the service? Excellent, very good, good, fair, bad. Do they give a
damn if I said it was bad? That the server was too kind to be really kind?
How was the mood? Excellent, very good, good, fair, bad. Do I tell them?
Is this a dear diary thing? Or perhaps a dear liary? They are witnesses to the
passing of my days, they are also my jailers in so many ways, both - the clear
ones and dates filled with haze, now that I reread them, their precursor signs
never cease to amaze. The truth sometimes I withhold, and at other times
full of lies to behold, I wrote them for other people to see (Everyone writes a
diary expecting it would be read sometime, even those who write in pathetic
codes). Bringing them with me wherever I travel, even when I end up writing
things like “I contemplated my navel”. Why bother write diaries if not to tell
the truth, might as well buy a magazine from a booth, why did I make it an
aim to fill them with deceit, as if, of my life, a forger was doing a counterfeit.
A Chinese knock-off the real me – bought at a cheap discount store.
Will you come back again? Yes No.
Do I have to book next time?
If our operators may be busy, please call again.
Please call again, please call.
Please.
Their operators are just as lonely as the rest of us, pleading for a phone call,
anything to fill the free minutes that come with mobile anyway. Makes one
feel powerful that he initiated a communication. Even if was through trickery
and deceit. Even if it was to buy something. Even if it was to shorten the
night.
And the operators are busy, and yet somehow you do call again.
I do call again. Compulsively raping the numbers, already anticipating the
mynameissoandsohowmayihelpyou bit. Maybe it is to compensate that phone
call I never made, the one that I thought I’d have time “later”. After the sur-
gery when he’d go out of the reanimation. The phone card just had to expire
in the middle of the conversation. I had to say a cruel joke: “Well, you lost
all the weight you wanted to lose. Fine you could have lost it through a diet,
but having these health complications is just as good. Don’t you think?” The
succession of small laughs was still there at the other end of the line. Before
it broke for good. For bad. For ever.