Artist's Mistress

You know what is good about the time spent with whores? No, not the slang, the real ones, the professional ones. You don’t owe them anything other than money. It is a give and take relationship in pure monetary terms. You go, pay and forget the object, if not the subject which you might open up with someone else given that you have enough to pay for. You don’t even have to know one to talk of one. Ironically you cannot really know a whore because of the objectivity of this profession. You get in, you get done and you get gone. Uncomplicated.

There are these people I often see. On some days I have called them ‘my’ people, on a few others I have felt loathing for the way they behave that I liken myself to being a misanthrope; for the rest of the days when I don’t ‘see’ them, I feel nothing. A grown up ‘community’ that we are, ill words are best not spoken, confrontations are best avoided. We’re all half-baked scientists, running experiments on each other to see if someone fits our dyslexic view of the world. When such a large ensemble is available for experimentation, we generalize observations, creating stereotypes which more often than not, backfire.

Often we find ourselves caught in this push and pull of our own assumptions and findings. Am I or am I not because we know that we don’t know enough, but we can never know how much would be enough to know for sure. If we did, that would be the end of it. We devise tools to study them and classify as probable and improbable, but we don’t have time to do the math either. We’re always running with a fear of our lies hanging on to us, like a stray chewing gum in the bottom of our soles, can’t shake it off without getting hands dirty, can’t get hands dirty for everyone’s watching us now. Maybe tomorrow, but tomorrow comes with a promise of yet another tomorrow.

It takes a lot of guts to be a whore following a conscious decision. Surprisingly, visiting and leaving a brothel with dignity also needs the same kind of guts to not feel guilty.

(Image Credits: Google)