Chapter 7

Why is it that my current boyfriend is a fisherman? Or is it that he happens to be a fisherman? Do I know the difference? Is it some kind of karma or some long lasting grief based on the fact that my earlier boyfriend was also a fisherman who met an untimely death when a barracuda attacked him? Is it God or Mother Nature's humor that my then fisher boyfriend should die from such a rare death because barracuda attacks on humans are very rare statistically on the record? Is my current lover replacing the vacuum left in my heart when my earlier boyfriend travelled to the Good Place from where you cannot return to Earth unless you are Jesus Christ or the gods of Hinduism who continue to appear on this planet through various avatars? Is my current boyfriend a replacement lover that some unseen Force has put in my life due to my good deeds?

Chapter 6 [Modified on April 30, 2024]

I am feeling a bit down today, and therefore listening to Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" on a loop on YouTube.

I sometimes suffer from unexplained melancholy. Some psychiatrists said it's Bipolar Disorder Type 2 and put me on medication.

However, there's the danger if there's a misdiagnosis. A friend's son told me that his father was wrongly diagnosed and consequently put on the wrong medication.

"He started to get feelings of being a useless entity on Earth. He began to have emotions that made him feel that his life lacked meaning and purpose," the son told me.

What happened then? I asked.

He told me his father committed suicide but being so young at the time his mother kept that fact as a secret. It was only when the son turned 18 that his mother told him the truth and declared that she had lied that the father had left her and the son.

Though this Dylan song doesn't relate to my personal life, I guess I kind of want to feel sadness because I can identify with so many millions of people having lost their loved ones due to war, conflict, famine and whatnot. So perhaps I like this song because it reminds me to be humble about me being fortunate in most areas of my life.

However, my favorite song of all time is Coldplay's "The Hardest Part" because with every listen, it brings to my mind all the loves I lost but not necessarily through breakups. I guess the sexual drive may be the strongest in all living organisms. 

Except for one, I still keep in touch with everyone with whom I had romantic and sexual affairs. Me distancing from them was more to do with our life circumstances. Sometimes it was due to long distance relationships. In fact, my current boyfriend and I have a hard time maintaining our relationship with me been on the Moon and he been on Earth. Contacting and communicating through Skype type software and apps is quite difficult and doesn't really make us feel we are that close as lovers.

Call it our fate due to the fault in our stars.

Sometimes I desperately want to believe in coincidence, destiny, and serendipity, just to calm down the anxiety, depression, and panic attacks that grip my mind at most unexpected times. At such times, I listen to my second favorite song, Linkin Park's "In the End" which now always makes me wonder why Chester Bennington took his own life. Is it because in the end nothing really matters as he sings? Is it because when we die, we return to Earth's dust and join the energy cycle of the Cosmos?

I confess there were two instances in my life when I seriously considered committing suicide. But I saw a dream in which this Dylan song provided a backdrop for images of the evolution of life. Waking up, I realized that this same song was playing in the trailer of "I'm Not There" based on Dylan's life.

The dream made me realize that suicide was not an option and that life is too beautiful. To this day I don't know why I saw this dream which saved me in every way imaginable. I like to believe it was God working in His mysterious way and saved me. But the problem is I don't believe in a Higher Power. I consider the Universe as just the place that exists on its own for eternity although I don't know why the Cosmos is organized and arranged in the way it is now. Hence, I keep wondering why we have planets with life on it. Or are all things alive such as seemingly inanimate rocks? Shall I worship them although Buddhists and Hindus are not idol worshippers though Muslims perceive they are? I like Richard Dawkins' ideas although unlike him I don't have any problems worshipping gravity because this inexplicable force literally keeps us firmly grounded.

Chapter 5

I keep a journal. As anyone who keeps a diary can attest, such record keeping does help to organize thoughts in my mind. 

Which brings me to the case of Steve. Recently, I realized that if I had sincerely and wholeheartedly ever loved anybody, it is Steve. One of my scuba diving buddies. 

Though it pains me that he didn’t return my love in a romantic sense, I still feel he’s one of the few who have always been unprejudiced toward me and doesn’t mind my idiosyncrasies though I am a bit conscious that I am too campy and effeminate for some people’s tastes.

I have been trying hard not to get emotionally attached to Steve. 

One fine morning while Steve was dropping me off at the Earth to Moon shuttle terminal, I told him that in old age I will keep him company. I am not sure whether he was dodging the issue when he told me that he won’t be lonely because even when he becomes an elderly senior citizen, he would be working his ass off like any good German workaholic although he would always be in touch socially.

I guess it’s time I stick to my decision to give up any sense of romantic attachment with Steve because so far he seems unsettled around his occasional opening up to me which makes me wonder whether he has an affection somewhere in him for me but he is not sure or doesn’t want to express it.

So I really need to let him go. I need to stick to only rational actions although romantic love is one of the most irrational things I have experienced up to today in my life.

Chapter 4

This time around, I decided to keep my visit to Earth a secret although I decided there was no particular danger from anybody. Yet still, I cannot forget and put it in my past the fact that I was stabbed in the neck while entering my home in a dark alley and left bleeding to die. 

It might sound weird when I say that I smelt alcohol on my attacker just as he stabbed me.

I pressed my neck tightly to stop the blood flowing out.

I turned around and saw the attacker calmly walk out on to the main street and get on a waiting moped with the rider and him taking off seemingly without any hurry.

It was the early evening hours, yet it was quite dark.

I hailed a passing moped whose rider was generous enough to take me to the nearest hospital.

Strangely, while I was recuperating at the hospital, a police investigator came to see me, showed me passport sized photos of three men, and claimed they were my assailants. He asked me whether I know them and I told them I do not recognize them. The attack happened on a street with CCTVs and I guess the police discovered the identity of my attackers through those video footage. The officer said the three suspects belonged to a network but didn’t specify what type of a network it was. He said police hasn’t arrested the three suspects yet in order to keep tabs until a larger segment of the network could be apprehended. 

The arrest never took place.

A change of government occurred but the new administration made no move to arrest the perpetrators.

I believe that freedom of thought is the one singular thing that can save individuals as well as societies. So I was willing to fight for it even if I was killed in the process because I believed that was the only one true thing that could set any human free and therefore was worth fighting for.

Strangely, I realized that a major paradigm had shifted recently in my home country after the election of a heavy-handed leader who some saw as a brutal dictator with an iron fist. I lost all hope of getting justice.

Chapter 3

I had never sought to be a hero, and if today I am one among a small but strong segment of my people who hold on to liberal beliefs, it was because I stubbornly stuck with what I felt was the basic fundamental right of any living being, but which, for some reason, my people were afraid to be vocal about.  

The basic fundamental belief I am talking about is the choice to choose one’s faith - in addition to practice one’s sexuality which is one of the, or if not THE, strongest drive in any living being.

Perhaps it was because my society was too small and too tightly knit, and people were just afraid if change, even a little bit of it, might upset the whole system.

“Dare I disturb the Universe?” was a question I grappled with ever since my teens - ever since I read the inspiring book “The Chocolate War” by Robert Cormier.

By the time I spent more than a decade in the media, mainly in newspaper publishing, and I was entering my late 20s, I just became fed up, just like that, because nobody was opening up, nobody was speaking up, for the rights of those who held minority views in my society. My country was gradually leaving behind its constitutionally implemented secularism. My country was not respecting the religions of the minorities.

But secretly, I wondered whether it was that brief and first homosexual affair I had with a waiter at a restaurant that brought my downfall as a human being.

Chapter 2

I have a hard time convincing some of my friends that it was not out of a sense of regret that I regularly visit Earth.

“You are in denial. Just deluding yourself,” was how one of my closest friends put it during one of our alcohol binges while on a visit to Earth.

I insisted that it was not a sense of guilt that brought me back to Earth but I could see from my friend’s face that he was not totally convinced. 

I wondered why it was hard for anyone to understand that it was the most conscientious thing to do if your father himself had gone to every length to raise you against all terrible odds. My father had always been there for me, so why should my trips to Earth be taken as a sign of guilt rather than that of an altruism of sorts in addition to an act as a good son?

I found it difficult to digest that adulthood meant a complete forgetting of the past – and the people who shaped me into what I am now. 

And being the one who always stuck stubbornly to my beliefs, I decided that I am in the right, even if I did not understand my friend’s reasoning.

Actually, it was dearly held beliefs that in the first place that had led to me fleeing my home planet, Earth.

Chapter 1

All those draconian laws. I fear for my criminal prosecution. But for now there is so much infighting between the two main political parties, I became small fry. Not a personality who demands much attention when other more pressing State matters existed such as how many rivers to dam. 

This political bickering may also be the reason why there may not be another attempt to murder me. My country used to be a secular democracy with a healthy community of liberals but since democracy is essentially ochlocracy, it was quite predictable the majority will in the end support the far right conservative religious elements into government and therefore vote in a political party that supports the religion of the majority. That made life hell for me and my left wing friends.

I am a gay man and my boyfriend’s case is worse. He hails from a country which is 100 percent homogenous. Same language. Same faith. The phrase “unity in diversity”, my country’s slogan, even if my country is now a secular state only in name, doesn’t apply to him. But he is not worried. He is as cool as Bob Marley. Except that he doesn’t smoke pot. And he doesn’t do alcohol while on a fishing trip. Yes, he’s a fisherman from an island off the mainland.

It was not complete willingness on my part that I decided to shuttle between Earth and my second home the Moon even if I was enjoying my self-imposed exile on Earth’s satellite. Yes, I consider myself an exile even if I imposed that condition by myself on myself.

My father, in his ripe late 60s, had suffered double heart attacks in a row, within the space of a month, and I felt that, should I hope to enjoy a clear conscience for the rest of my life, I had to be there for my old man for the remaining part of his life.

This is why I am forced to make regular trips to Earth.

Prologue

The Moon. Circa 2500 AD.

Just imagine. Our Moon. Terraformed. Against all odds. One of the few things I still admire about humanity though I left the company of Earthlings because I have seen violence. In fact, I have experienced violence. Against my own self. I barely escaped with my life. If there’s anything worse than dirty politics, it’s violence from radicalized gangs.

I left the Earth because of unbearable constant sectarian and communal violence in the name of religion. While religion can unify a tribe, it can also divide a nation along language lines even if language can be a crucial factor in establishing a Nation State under the United Nations (UN) Charter.

I now call the Moon my second home. I try avoiding visiting the Earth unless it can’t be helped. Most of my family and friends are too sentimental and chose not to take a shuttle and settle on the Moon like I did. They don’t mind living a polluted life among Earth’s 8 billion Sapiens. They want to die and be buried on their Motherland. I can understand that traditional and cultural sentiment. 

Wait. Did I just say Motherland? Is Fatherland a more appropriate word because Earthlings are more successful now to hide their patriarchy – as demonstrated by the blockbuster critical hit “Barbie”? I don’t care. This war between feminism and masculinity will never die as long as people find trouble accepting all sort of genders, I guess. 

I am getting ready for my next visit to Earth. In a few days. I am not looking forward for the three Earth day trip crossing the 384,400 kilometers of desolate space. If there is anything I like about the vacuum of space, it’s the dead quietness which automatically puts me into a mode of transcendental meditation.

Preface [Modified on May 20, 2024]

This is a work of fiction. Unless otherwise indicated, all the names, characters, businesses, events, incidents, and some places in this book are either the product of my imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Though this novel has no relation to my real life, I am writing in "first-person" narration style, simply because I don't have any means to know what goes on in another person's mind and therefore I am taking this as a precaution lest I judge other people's outward actions wrongly. So "I" appear as the narrator of the protagonist in this story, as a person in the story, telling the story from my own point of view.

Another factor about this novel in the making is that I will be using the "stream of consciousness" style because it is a technique of writing that tries to capture the natural flow of a character's extended thought process, often by incorporating sensory impressions, incomplete ideas, unusual syntax, and rough grammar, which will give me more creative freedom. A crucial reason why I am using this method is to allow the protagonist to jump across scenes so that there will be no chronological order. Chronology doesn't matter in this story because this novel is like the protagonist's thoughts on his life experiences. The thoughts itself will give the idea of where he is and when the particular thoughts occur relevant to that environment he is appearing in.

In memoriam

Wherever you are now my friend, know that you will forever remain in my heart as my eternal bestie. You had always stood by my side, against all odds, when the whole world was against me. Know that I am now in a good place all because of you. Phir milenge agle janam mein. [We will meet in our next lifetime]. R.I.P. [Rest in Peace].

About this novel in the making…

Unlike my other blogs, this novel in the making contains titles as I post each chapter as a blogpost. Due to the nature of this novel as one being in constant development, any modifications and edits will be indicated with the words ‘UPDATED ON [DATE]’ in the title so that readers can easily find the chapters I have brought changes to. Enjoy.

Caution

This novel in the making is an adult-oriented fiction which contains a wee bit of science fiction and fantasy although the main focus is on the protagonist’s life as a homosexual man in a sexually and religiously stifled environment. My purpose for choosing a science fiction fantasy setting or genre is to enable me to explore my love for science in addition to find meaning to my homosexual and irreligious life. However, at no time do I claim that the scientific information I have dabbled here is true. Hence, please do not regard factual errors in science and technology in this novel as scientific truths. Please do your own research if you find my concepts, for example, that of gravity boots, clash with established scientific realities.

Warning

Do not view this site if you are under 18 years of age, or under legal age as required by your local laws for reading adult-only texts in your community. All queer literature here - including sexually explicit erotic writings in this novel in the making - are my property. You may reproduce some of the texts for reviewing or critiquing purposes if such work is not profit-oriented.