1001 Nights Cast

I entered the Internet Café for the third time that day. And, despite evidence to the contrary, I denied the possibility that I was becoming obsessed. Young people, I think, feel a threat when I enter the café because there is this great divide between us: they are having fun, the 17 young men surfing the internet and playing war games, whilst I am clutching a bundle of screwed-up tissues, red-eyed, and yes, I admit it, unhappy.

I am unhappy. My recent declaration of love to The Man Who Undoes Me had resulted in a vacuum of silence in which I was beginning to both find God and believe in violence as a force for the Highest Good. God, because who else could I pray to for a reply? Violence because sometimes I feel you need to use violence to make yourself heard.

All around me the young men are tapping away. So young and so innocent they seem but within those screens they are playing out a fantasy role as masked gunmen who slaughter those with wholly different aspirations from theirs. What are my aspirations? Sitting in the café looking at my empty inbox and contemplating hiring one of the young men to go and physically kidnap The Man Who Undoes Me and bring him to me so I can request he answer in detail exactly why my declaration of love has been dismissed as irrelevant.

And the fucking, you know? The fucking was so fucking good it would make you cry and actually does make me cry, right there in the Internet Café where I am haunted by the movement of ghosts of lovers past. Where are they all now anyhow? Those lovers I gave up, those lovers who gave up on me?

17 young men sit around me, each of them rapidly becoming ghosts in the war they are fighting, dying over and over again in their virtual battlefields. And whilst it is uncomfortable to admit this, my fantasy turns to the idea that The Man Who Undoes Me might be dead. Why should it only be my blood spilled? I could forgive him this silence if he had a valid reason, and in my current emotional state death, his death is the only valid reason I can accept. This is it, I think to myself, this is the fight I have long been dreading.

I wonder momentarily if I could join this group of impassioned young men with a cause worth fighting for instead of blowing my nose on my sleeve like the pathetic lovelorn woman I have allowed myself to become. Fucking email, who invented this shit?! I wasn’t into instant gratification before the Internet came into my life you know but well…it was all about the telephone not ringing back then, I suppose.

I wonder, if I were still young, whether I’d fall in love with any of the 17 young men playing war games in the room where I hold the torch for romantic love and all its glorious lies. I envy religious fanatics; I really do because it must be so nice for everything to be so damned clear-cut. To channel your heart into a group, a cause, or like these young men, a war in which they’d willingly die, happy knowing their love was justified. I’m ashamed, now I think about it, that I was nearly ready to break open the razor blades over The Man Who Undoes Me. Just the other night. I’d made five trips to the Internet Café that day, and you know all the other messages in my inbox became invisible for the simple fact that his reply was not there. I might have won the fucking lottery—who knows? I didn’t open any of the messages I did have.

Fuck him. Fuck telecommunications. Fuck the twenty-first century. But I don’t leave. I refresh the screen in case a message has slipped into my inbox. Nothing. Fuck him.

Seventeen young men who are capable of breaking 17 young hearts, and more of course because really, who ever stops at one? Once you get a taste for breaking hearts it’s hard to stop. But then, their hearts belong to a cause—the war they’re rehearsing for—the one taking place on the squalid streets where they spend their time, instead of in school. Christ. Now I’m moralising, and I’m in no position to be doing that, not while I plot the murder of The Man Who Undoes Me who is resisting commitment as opposed to being committed to resistance.

Perhaps, I think, looking around me at the 17 young men, The Man Who Undoes Me was never really my lover? Looking over at each one of the 17 young men, it strikes me that if I stare really hard I can almost see through them. They are distracted to the degree that they really are fading away from this reality, their hearts taken hostage by the dangerous heroes of this virtual world, this violent underground in which they are no longer the hopeless, marginalized young people we believe them to be. In this Internet Café, they matter, they fight hard and they win. They score points and this is currency, this is their currency. What is mine? Tears? I’ve shed more than enough for one day. Love? What does that even mean anymore—I love you?

Logging off, I realise The Man Who Undoes Me is just another ghost, a remnant of a memory of a lover I once had. He will fade from my sight, just as each of these 17 young men will fade from our memory when in a week’s time, a story will break in the news of a bombing that has destroyed this Internet Café where I lost my heart, and 17 young men lost their lives.