ScarboroughBoy and I

Pandora's box: don't open something you can't close. Don't let loose what you can't contain.

Life. What is it without death? Or love without loss?

It's not what other people do to you that makes you lose faith ... it's what you do to other people. When you get away with doing things you had no right doing, it makes you wonder what kinds of secrets other people are carrying around inside them. Can you really trust anyone?

Can you really trust yourself?

What is trust? What is good and what is bad?

What are all these things aside from what you have grown being told they are? Who decides what's good for you? Rules made by people who you don't know? And who don't know you? Who don't know what goes on in your life ... in your head ... or where it matters most of all: in your heart?

Are you going to live your life 'playing it safe' ... in your 'comfort zone'?

Or will you ever dare to follow your heart - forgetting about what 'they' say is right or wrong or good or bad?

Is anything ever any of those on it's own and are they only bullshitting when they say 'the end justifies the means'?

No one cares to know why you do the things you do ... because they can only see what they can see ... they can see the laughing and the joking, the flash car, the perfect nails.

Can anyone see anything else?

Can anyone see .. as Paolo Coelho puts it in 'The Zahir' ... "the empty space inside" for which we are forever (qoute Coelho again) "trying to remain upright and decent , in order to do honour not to the walls or the doors or the windows, but to the empty space inside, the space where we worship and venrate what is dearest and most important to us."

"Yes, we are all cathedrals."

And cathedrals we are.

Vast places of worship.

But what are we without the worshippers?

We can't all be the Notre Dam ... or the Sacre Cour.

We can't all .. or always .. swell with the solemn, sweet sounds of hymn .. a thousand reverent choruses.

We can't all fulfil our destinies. Some of us can sometimes. Some ... never.

How many of us are like backstreet cathedral we stumbled upon one late night in Istanbul ... that boy from Scarborough, Canada and I? That cathedral with no lights on ... and chains on the doors?

ScarboroughBoy and I ... we tried to make the cathedral come alive. We tried. But there were chains. And no lights. And severe consequences should a Canadian backpacker be caught tresspassing with a Pakistani one so late at night. So we turned back.

We turned to Taksim Square ... with its merry lights and its jaunty clubs ... to Istiklal Street and to places filled with cheer and cigaretter smoke. Places alive with the sound of music and the heat of bodies moving close to each other.

Places easier to understand. Easier to be a part of.

How many of us are like that backstreet cathedral? With our lights switched off and our gates in chains? How many would-be worshippers turn back when they see the darkness that envelopes us? The doors we haven't thrown open?

How many would-be worshippers do we send off to places easier to understand? Easier to be a part of?

And how much of it can we blame them for? How much of the blame lies with us?

I dedicate this post to ScarboroughBoy ... someone I haven't thought of in a very, very long time. Four years maybe. Four years since that late night of revelations and contemplation. Four years since I tasted my first snow. I still wear the MissSixty-copy paira jeans he helped me pick from the piles and piles in that street market. Four years!

Thankyou ScarboroughBoy for a really funky hard-wearing paira pants.

And for being the inspiration behind a really therepeutic post.