Quercetin

“Why write fiction?” asked the bookshop’s sales manager, “Why not write about philosophy – erratic emotions, wise thinking, real experiences, contemplation – you’d be good at that. The world is full of forged personalities as it is. Maybe that’s why you don’t have clients. People need to relate to the gist these days rather than decode stuff. It’s not the time for fiction. Advertise that you know more.”

I didn’t know how to tell this lady, whose nametag read, ‘Honey’, but whose real name was Joy, that she answered her question herself. 

Emotions are erratic. Even when we write about the past we see it through the magnifying glass of the present. We sometimes even foresee how our past can look like from a future – either way it can never again be like the past entirely. 

Moments of it will wax and wane like the moon. They will disperse to make way for the sun, or gather to fall on us like rain. But it won’t be both the sun and the moon, the rain and the rainbow, it won’t take over the twinkle of the stars, or the sway of the leaves, and everything it was when it was everything that consumed us back then. 

Wise thinking: freely limiting, sometimes destructive, safely confining – a directory of sayings and firm short quotes that ‘sum it all up’ to humanize and de-humanize. Hours without food sitting on a hard surface until your sit bone goes numb can make you wise simply because you allowed your thoughts to boil to the point of numbness. It is an art now to think of nothing. A relief. Mastery I wish to master to have a choice between thinking too much and not thinking at all. 

We communicate such grand things that we may have experienced, but most probably never in the way we experienced them. Yet someone somewhere benefits from the formulated cryptic way you simplify your life lessons and steer them to make them relatable.  

Real experiences – what is real? An instant can last a lifetime. A lifetime can end in an instant. The grand beginnings and endings – the real stuff – matter the least. And whatever happens in between has taught us that ‘real’ is very much an opinion. I wondered if Joy knew she was a fictional character in this histrionic portrayal by changing her nametag to Honey. 

Contemplation. The holy grail of philosophy, I know. But everything can be contemplative, from the sting of a bee to the scream of a dying soldier. Depending on the writer or speaker, both can be made equally disturbing. 

If the world is full of forged personalities, why not create a new forged person with qualities we are curious about? Why not draw out, in details we need, how they dealt with such things that are seemingly so heavily intangible at one point in life, and so weightlessly tangible in another? Why not tell a story of why it is intricately so? 

You can’t do this through philosophy. You can only do it with a ridiculous amount of imagination of characters that are able to inflict great amounts of pain and truthfully say that it was because the sun was too hot that day, or their neck was too stiff, or because they had too many green peppers the night before that they mistook their stomach cramps to a life-changing panic attack that led to an epiphany. 

So I told the un-Joyful Honey a little story void of philosophy, only made relatable in a way that is non-relatable to her advice for me to change what I post on social media. 

I was once one of the listeners of a funny story on my in-laws’ dinner table, a story about a man who took out a whole raw onion from his Kipling backpack and ate it like an apple. The smell of the raw onion infused the whole compartment, and my sisters in law had a newfound respect for onions and the Quercetin substance it contains which keeps viruses away. They described the man to be a typical unkempt “Swiss mountain guy”.  

I never saw this man. But I outlined his face, I made patches in his unshaved auburn beard peppered with grey hairs, I chose his wrinkled clothes on which his sweat cooled. 

I colored his backpack yellow and stained it with ink and dirt, I packed in it a hardcover of Umberto Eco’s In the Name of the Rose, a crumpled directory of mountain guides, and a 500ml metal thermos with a rubber ring to go through your finger that he got as an advertisement from a Zurich insurance company called simply, Zurich, and whose logo was a trademarked font and a patented blue. It also had creased candy wrappers and a couple of clean napkins enfolding one dirty one from weeks before. 

Did it matter that it wasn’t true that he carried these insubstantial things in his backpack, things that identified tons about his character? No. I put them there because I forged a relation with the man whom I decided was eating an onion to heal from the disease of loneliness, a disease that was eating his immune system away like he was devouring the onion. Maybe he just liked onions and nothing more. To me, he ate the onion because he was hanging on a thin thread. I did it unreasonably. The best things in life contain no shrine for reason. 

But since anyway who we are rarely matters, and how we are perceived as is a major concern – despite what all the philosophers say – I, without his consent, permitted him to allow me to portray him as I did, as I do, and as I will. 

Since then, this man was a son in one short story of mine. He was a lover in another. He was a widow in a poem. He was thirteen, and thirty-five, and seventy, and sometimes he was ageless. He was an instant that kept flying forward to me through a medium. 

He was a memory I never had, but more vivid than ones I had. So I allowed his onion to fumigate the biggest compartment in the train of my thoughts. No questions asked. And he visited me again when Joy, or Honey, or whoever she feels like being, asked me the question of why this – and not that. 

I want to call imagination freedom, but what of the paradox of it also being a prison? You have to be disposed to accepting to what unfolds in a made-up story, not what you have outlined to unfold. Sometimes, this place is not where you wanted to be. Just like life. 

Philosophy reverberates experiences and questions every nook and cranny those experiences cradled in. But fiction is more like life than philosophy can ever be, especially if you’re writing it. 

You want to write about a man and a dog, but you don’t know why you end up with a story about a woman and a bird. You don’t question it, you let yourself keep writing – wide-eyed at what the woman did for the bird, and what the bird did in return, and who witnessed all that happened between them and others. The weeks you spent outlining the story of the man and the dog goes out the window. You are in a new place now because you can’t find your way to where you originally thought you’d end up.  

So I looked at Joy and asked, “Why does your nametag read ‘Honey’, when your real name is Joy?” 

And she said, “Because I like honey, and I don’t feel like a joy”. 

I smiled, she laughed. She gave me the receipt for the two books I bought. I shook my head and gestured for her to throw it in the bin. I told her I would rather make no income than finalize philosophies, which have no finality, to gain clients. 

I would rather imagine than decide. I would rather allow my mind to play tricks on me than educate myself to influence others with a rigid mind. I would rather not know, than know. She agreed. She recommended I also change my name every once in a while, to play with reality. I told her reality is being able to change your name, albeit on a nametag, according to your mood. On the way home, I thought how I struck a friendship with this woman whom I may never see again. 

Two weeks later, when I finished the books I bought, I went back to the shop and I saw a sign “FOR RENT” hanging on the black aluminum frame of the large glass windows. Joy, or Honey, or maybe she was neither, was immediately and randomly added to the cast of a screenplay I was working on. 

I look forward to meet her again elsewhere in the future, maybe she’ll be ten, maybe she’ll be seventy-four, maybe she’ll be talking to the man eating an onion on the SBB Swiss train and asking him about his taste for unusualness. 

Maybe they’ll fall in love. Maybe they’ll move in together, maybe they’ll cause each other pain. Or maybe they won’t ever meet and we’ll just stick to philosophically believing only the things that happen, just because things that don’t happen have not yet happened. 

But as for me, and for all I know, the un-Joyful Honey may very well be having a first bite of a whole onion full of Quercetin right in this moment, to feel more like the Honey she wants to be instead of the Joy she has to be. Or maybe she takes the bite realizing that it’s the only creative fictional way to stick to the Joy she is. 

_{Beisan A. Alshafei}

_{Written on August 5, 2020}