Thursday, Feb. 17, 2005 - 8:53 p.m.
"You and your damn melancholy," she smiled at him. "Where do you get it from?"
He wasn't sure. He had never seen himself as melancholic, but he supposed that the adjective could apply. They had been walking in the city at night, on that road behind Bugis junction for no particular reason. They saw two adolescent girls, obviously lesbians, walk towards them holding hands. They were such a cliche, the pretty one and the other one who bound her breasts. As they passed, he caught the pretty one looking at him for half an instance, playing that urban game involving lines of sight. There is always that attraction to getting caught.
Immediately he told his friend - they don't know it yet but they won't last. The pretty one will tire of her girlfriend's ugliness, and she cannot resist men. That was the statement that provoked the accusation of melancholy.
He had this ability to see the end of things in their beginnings. The ability arose not from being depressive, but in being pensive. He also understood that the idea of two friends walking in the city at night for no particular reason, was a false one. He suspects she understands it too.
But back to her question, where does he get his melancholy? Black bile, secreted by the kidney and spleen, according to the medieval theory of the body's four humours. That was from all the Chaucer shit he had to study in school. So perhaps it came from the crevice of his spleen - that little space between the love of all things, and the vision of their destruction.
