Starry Sins

Sins didn’t like getting old. It was a bit narcissistic of him to think like that, but he couldn’t help it. He didn’t want to get old. After all, who did? No one, that’s who. He was standing within an inch off his dusty mirror placed atop his bathroom’s washbasin. Glaring at the wrinkles lined up on the edge of his eyes, he thought of the time when he was seventeen years old, his face smooth and supple as a sliced juicy piece of freshly cut mango. A vivid image of a ripe mango filled inside his head, its flesh wringing itself and secreting juice over his face, eagerly leaned forward to embrace the cold fluid healing his old face. The image dissolved, and Sins was left staring at his wrinkles again.

He wanted to drink the water of the fountain of youth, now imagining himself ravishing Penelope Cruz in the Pirates of the Caribbean’s fourth installment, and off they would go arm in arm holding the water of the fountain, sauntering into the dense jungle of an abandoned island to make love till the end of time itself.

He went to his room and decided to call Starr and ask her to meet him tonight. His roommates had gone to their hometown for a week, and today was the first day out of seven when he would be having the apartment flat entirely to himself and whomsoever he bought. Grinning delightedly thinking about the night, he checked the fridge for beer, and found nothing inside, except a packet of milk and a small cockroach which flew, aiming for his eyes. Sins jumped back from a bending squat position and slipped, his eyes making contact with the specimen, and was reminded of several horror movies where insects entered human bodies to begin breeding. The thought almost made him puke. His slip turned into a ducking movement just when he closed his eyes, loosing control of his body momentarily.

Sins lay on the floor and decided to stay there for some time, wishing Starr was lying on top of him or vice-versa. He looked at his watch. It was still very early, just seven minutes past six in the morning, and he was as wide awake as an owl on its night hunt, thanks to the cockroach, which had scared the living wits out of him. He wondered if it was an omen for today’s events. He wasn’t that busy though. He had a few pages of the report he was finishing about the intangible impact of sports on the regional communities living in the country’s hinterlands. Once he was done with that, he would be visiting an old friend, who had promised to get him a bag of top quality marijuana from a village in the mountains he had recently visited, and he had called him last night to tell him he had successfully executed the venture. Sins would help him find buyers and get rid of it within a duration of one week. Easy. Starr’s friends would lap it up like a pack of wolves. Sometimes, he wondered how Starr managed to survive the bimboesque atmosphere she was subject to everyday, especially from her numb nutted male friends, who barely managed to string together a sentence of words if asked about any general topic other than relationship gossip and other people’s mundane lives. Adept at quashing intelligence and wisdom, they had subject their bodies to every kind of intoxication imaginable, plus committed the added crime of boasting about it to anyone they met. Sins had spent the last two months trying to convince Starr that they would be arrested soon in a raid, and that she better get out their toxic company soon. She hadn’t listened. She ‘liked’ them, was what she had told him.

Sins made the effort to get up, and had propped himself up on the sofa when he heard the newspapers slam against the door. He switched on his laptop, and was greeted with the image of Katy Perry’s breasts on his desktop background. Fighting the urge to surf porn in the early morning, he closed the laptop with difficulty. His mind was in full impulse mode, evidently nudging his system to head back to his laptop, and enticing his imagination with more women. To fight the thought, he coerced himself back to the floor and did seventeen push-ups, and felt the blood leave his loins and circulate back into the mainstream, importantly his brain. Though the breasts remained in his mind, the sudden inexplicable urge to pleasure himself had left. He remembered how years of visual abuse had strung him out dry day in, day out in front of the screen, affecting literally every phase of his life unconsciously, if not behaviorally, but then who was he kidding? How was he to know? He had never asked for feedback.

He hit the showers with a vengeance, purging his body of the obscene thoughts, and felt rejuvenated. He felt the rush of the morning kicking in to his brain. He felt he was high. A sudden jolt of dopamine to stimulate motivation and will to solve the problems of one day after other, one day after other and repeat. As long as a person had problems to solve, the grind kept him/her happy, because the high of solving the problem after a period of hours or days or months or years was worth the time it needed to be solved. All that mental and physical effort for the high. As far as Sins was concerned, the purpose of life was to get high. A man or woman had choices and different tools in order to do so, and so they could choose between instant gratification and delayed reward.

Getting dressed as fast as he could, he grabbed the packet of milk from the fridge and made a banana milkshake for himself in the mixer. He chose the shirt, Starr had given him last week, a pale blue containing the minutest checks he had ever seen. It looked amazing. Just like Starr. She was amazing, at everything. He couldn’t wait to talk to her. She understood him so…well, that it hurt when he couldn’t speak to her everyday, courtesy her advertising job, which got hectic sometimes and her dumb friends, who were on her heads all the time. Sins hated them with all his heart.

Sins was ready to leave. He took his bag and hoisted it on his shoulders. As soon as he opened the door, he saw Starr waiting outside.

“Starr? What happened? How are you here?”

“I quit the job. So did two of my friends. Can they stay at your place this week till your friends arrive? Please, Sins”

“Darling, I don’t want them here. They are a bad influence, you know that as well as me. Then, why? Starr, why?”

“They are downstairs”

“What?”

“They’re coming up. Please Sins, for me”

Sins looked into her eyes and sighed. He could never say no to her. He loved her.