COFFEE CYNICISM

I took my first sip of cynicism a long time ago. It tasted like cold, watered down black coffee. I used to not relish alcohol because it burnt my throat and sent my head in a tizzy. Matter of fact, I still don’t. Coffee cynicism is however strikingly different. Alcohol does not aid in memory retention or in this case, cynicism retention. You see, I don’t want to delude my senses when I feel cynical. I want to feel its slow rise, witness its heat spread through my body and watch as it leaves my system through the corner of my salt rimmed eyes before I shut my eyes and watch the world drop dead.

I’ve always rebelled against cynicism with an exuberant cheeriness: a sipping lemonade, polishing pizza demeanor. I’ve cajoled comrades oh-so-desolate, hugged an intimate friend for a long time when he looked at me and confessed that he was a bad person. “No, you’re not” I mouthed confidently.

I have also had friends do the same in return. They’d pick me up from a bad day and force me into a shiny new one with the promise of chatty evenings and movie nights. But I’ve at times wanted to shove myself into the shiny day, without anyone’s help. Quite often, I have managed to do so too. But this is not to deny that in my attempts, I haven’t spent long nights staring at pages in my journal. There were empty pages, pages which struck words out, pages damp from tears, pages which failed to carry anything beyond the words “I”, pages with words which are undecipherable owing to bad penmanship.

But all those long nights, would be succeeded by a day of studying news from “reliable” media-houses, okay-ish writing and passages from either Pamuk or Dickens or Woolf or Tolstoy. When the real world fails you, guardians of the fictional awaken to stroke your hair, hug you intimately, sing you to sleep. The fictional world does not lack cynicism but it has taught me that cynicism can be magically pretty. Its prettiness rests in the fact that it acts as a precursor to a less cynical time and then a lesser cynical time and then to a time with no cynicism at all.

And so I cried with David Copperfield, rode a train with Anna Karenina, organized a party with Mrs. Dalloway and rolled my eyes with Emma Bovary because they never left. All I had to do was flip a page and they would start chatting like I was their friend from a time long lost.

I was.

Anna would explain her lousy predicament. She loved Vronsky but loathed him. I would tell her that we’ve all been there and through her story witness my past rise before me boldly. I would try to quell it but it left often leaving me with a sense of shame and an unflinching need to dive head first into the cushion on my bed. David wept when he spoke of Mr. Creakle, his rather scary headmaster and I in turn told him of teachers who sent shudders down my limbs at age fourteen.

And so cynicism did come and leave. It would come and stay for as long as it pleased but when it left it reunited me with an old friend. Maybe not a real one, but I didn’t care. For a long time, this way of dealing with cynicism seemed to lack power. I used to think that I am not up and about empowering myself: publishing essays, campaigning for a cause? But I just existed; less cynical than the day before. But now that I think of it, I managed to befriend people who never existed. What could be more powerful that an overactive imagination?

Cynicism is crucial because when you come out of it you’ve gained more than some measure of strength. In my case, I befriended a few Russians, a couple of Turkish folks, many Englishwomen and shook hands with some crestfallen Americans. I’ve empathized with them and they never failed to do the same. I was averse to cynicism earlier because people seemed to overdose on it. They lay drunk in stupor unable to decode their own words. But a healthy dose of coffee cynicism annihilates its own existence goading you back to a state of exuberant cheeriness.