Love Affairs: Tales of Love, Romance and Passion

Table of Contents

Prologue

Portrait I: April

Portrait II: Sandy

Portrait III: Stacy

Portrait IV: Charlotte

Epilogue

About Arash Farzaneh

Love Affairs

By Arash Farzaneh

Published by Arash Farzaneh at Smashwords

Copyright 2016 Arash Farzaneh

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Prologue

The habitual potpourri of noise from the street - the rattling and rustling of engines, an old man's cough, the confusion and disorder of rapid streams of traffic - combine resoundingly, relentlessly on the busy streets of Vancouver under the unblinking eye of a warm afternoon sun.

Among fragments of conversation, a whirlwind of footsteps rushes into more than one direction, you face the moving circus of faces in all their diversity - kids, unshaven panhandlers, couples, perverts - and in the midst of all these lonely cartoon characters, one can detect sandals that reveal adorable smooth feminine feet, which embody fully and lusciously the foothold of desirable bodies full of desires.

All kinds and types of girls can be found on the street. There are girls with designer bags on their shoulder, girls with make-up all made up to please, girls with love smoldering in their eyes, girls with T-shirts so tight that spell out the secret alphabet of lust, girls with boyfriends as barriers or as their little helpers, girls with aubergine breasts, girls with plum breasts.

If I were that guy over there, a block to my left, the one in the loose flannel pants and the life-saver jacket, I would step up to the blossoming dawning beauty waiting for the green man to appear and ask her if she wanted to dive to the bottom of the ocean with me.

Or if I had absolutely nothing to lose in this world, I would grab the dark-skinned, oval-faced, somewhat daydreaming, short brunette by the hand and take her to a deserted tropical island where I would make love to her until the earth stopped rotating. I would gracefully, majestically put my arm around her delicate waist and dance a Viennese Waltz. Da-da-da-da da-dum-da-da.

Such wondrous opportunities and wonderful delights fill the vernal air. Love is in the air. I can feel it, smell it; in other words, I know it is there. A day without love is wasted time and such had been my fate last winter during which I reflected and hibernated like a tired and exhausted bear.

During these periods of reflection, I would dream of possible favorable turns of events, fantasize about different outcomes and realities and find ways and methods to escape the trap of a boring and mundane world to which ordinary people are enslaved. They feel no desires, no passion and are content pursuing matters of no weight or substance during their lifetime; money, jobs, and career have never managed to intrigue me or capture my interest or attention over a sustained amount of time.

Where everything ended up, like the flowing river that found its mouth and inspiration in the wide endless ocean, it all related back to the circle of love in all its diverse forms. Even love followed its own hierarchy starting from infatuation, one night stands, two night stands, several night stands (where one keeps busy and loses count) and, forgive my sentimentality, there is also the highest and purest crystallized romantic form, where knights lose themselves in dreams about chasing chaste virginal women and catch damsels that fall from the sky.

Love is an ode to spring. I have had even one night stands that have been a pure expression of poetry. It can start with an almost invisible tiny spark and lead from eye contact to idle talk to the touch of the hand; she accidentally brushes up against you, you kiss her on the cheek, more eye-contact, more smiling, the first holding of hands (oh cute puppy love content walking down the street), culminating in the first wet kiss.

The tongue gets involved, you grow adventurous, touch her left breast and pretend it was an accident, leave it there for a longer time, pretending your arm has fallen asleep, and before you know it, all your endeavors lead to perfect success in the culmination of the best and most entertaining of all games human life can offer.

These streaming thoughts and ideas are observed and recognized by a young man sitting in a café by the name of Madeleina wearing dark shades, drinking hot coffee and allowing his mind and feet to take a load off, his idle eye to wander aimlessly and to vigorously soak up the beauties that pass him by while his hand scribbles and scribes whatever comes to his mind.

I will never forget those idle warm days, a time to recuperate from all the evils in our world and to brace oneself for the newly recurring every day dull routine. There are some moments when you feel so vivid, so full of potential and life and passion, that you want to devour life with all that it can muster, with all that it can lay bare before you, for you to touch, to hold and to gnaw on those experiences for years, decades, life-times to come.

I cannot understand all those poor lonely creatures that have lost faith in their youth and start acting dull and responsible from an early age on. What juicy joys pass them by unnoticed, what glorious moments! And then others who complain about not being able to meet anybody, who take in book after book of self-help, a how-to guide for helping you find someone, all those exercises in front of the mirror that supposedly help you become who you actually are.

Self-actualization and humbug along those lines. Yet their problem is simple enough; they get trapped in repeating thought cycles, as a Buddhist friend once explained to me.

Where to meet people? Well, just open your eyes. There right in front of you. In cafés, grocery stores, theatres, Sunday church, university, back-alleys... An angler knows where to bait his hook in the clear flowing water and the world becomes his delicious oyster; whether it be for a length of time or for a single rambunctious bout.

It does not matter where passion manifests itself. It could be in the back seat of a Renault or a Chevrolet or some undisturbed bushes in a near-by park, for, frankly, between two consenting adults there won't be any beating around the bushes. It could be in some back-alley, or a tumble in the snow as long as it is not an act devoid of feeling.

That is where I draw the line, the place where automata end and one with warm breathing and a beating heart begins. I cannot stand people to whom a marvelous thing of beauty such as lovemaking slips off as meaningless bragging, and where quantity appears to outweigh the quality of the experience. I cannot tolerate guys whose spiritual goal consists of getting down as often as possible and who compare charming vivid girls to golf fields, putt in 6th hole and birdie!

And I am not prudish or anything - anyone who knows me knows that beneath my sensitive façade there is a brute, a pervert (after all, lecher is a French word). To me, everyone is unique in this world; every girl has qualities and destinies and favorite positions that, like fingerprints, belong only to them.

Just like Stacy, the girl I am waiting for. As you can see even idleness has its parameters. Any moment she can walk down this road, her face red as a tomato from the sun – she has oversensitive skin - with her tight jeans and her lipstick of natural color. I have never seen her wear a skirt; in fact, she is strongly opposed to it; I cannot say why.

Stacy is a girl who is notoriously late. Not that she is forgetful or lazy or disrespectful. Oh no, au contraire, mon frère. She just does too much. She crams too many items into an already air-tight schedule: animal rights organizations, nudist societies (I’ve been trying to get her to hook me up with the latter but she has always refused), her vegetarian one-fine-day-to-be vegan group, amnesty international, socialist circles and anarchist parties (party both in its political and its fun-based sense).

Quite a chick, Stacy is. She always has romantic dates. A few days ago, she met this guy on the Ferries and they’re practically going out, while she is entertaining an intense Internet relationship (assuredly quite platonic) with a guy from the States and just recently (time is a relative matter) she has ended a two-and-a-half-week relationship with a Tele sales representative.

Nonetheless, Stacy is one the girls you can always count on as a friend. She may seem promiscuous, and she may indeed be so, but she is also invaluable as someone you can count on for advice. I have always seen her as a goodhearted worldly young woman who is of a caring and giving nature.

In fact, she is so entertaining and willing to help you out that I have often felt tempted to make up complicated scenarios to be resolved by her magnificent shrewdness. All those fictitious names and tangles that I have supposedly gone through and their proposed solution have proven to me that among my lady friends no one can beat Stacy when it comes to being witty.

Could I get a refill on that?

The shorthaired brown-eyed full-lipped waitress smiles as she fills my coffee to the brim. Last time I was here we had an enlightening conversation regarding my T-shirt. I happened to wear my ET-shirt and she told me how ET and Ghostbusters ruled, the only interesting and memorable remnants of the otherwise deplorable 80ies.

I suggested a sequel including both parties; ET being chased by the Ghostbusters for a huge juicy reward. ET seen as a national threatening and terrorizing alien (they must have confused him with the green hungry monster Slimer) would be tracked down by FBI agents; the Mafioso mayor of New York would insist on cutting up the alien’s chest wide open in order to catapult its liver (provided ET had one) into outer space, to show the other goddam aliens out there that we ain’t afraid of them; we ain’t taking no shit from creatures from Mars!

Just as they were about to slice him up, the goodhearted Ghostbusters would change sides and show up in their formidable funky ghost-mobile, punch out the medical staff and turn some of the dark-shaded suit-and-tied FBI agents into stone and save ET. They would say go, be free now, ET and hand him a bike with which he would beam himself into space, so he could go home, back to his planet wherever that was. The End.

I wonder if she is thinking of our last conversation as she’s pouring me coffee. She gives me a second smile, which is quite different from the obligatory respectfully phony smile they give the regular regal customers. I smile back thinking about how troubadours used to pour out their hearts on the side of the road singing about thighs, tender breasts and eyes illuminating the sky around midnight, eternal moon songs & sunny tunes.

There is a sweet short girl with a hooked nose and high cheekbones wearing a sleeveless blue top; her back towards me, she is half-involved in a magazine, idly skimming through the pages to read a line here and there of an article or just looking at the latest fashion pictures, maybe at one of those almost naked, wide hairy-chested guys posing with a golden Rolex on each wrist.

I wonder if she is killing time like me. She does not seem to be expecting anyone; she looks too relaxed to be impatiently waiting for someone. Even though I am actually enjoying the merciless slaughter of time, I still, out of habit, look at my watch and send down longing gazing looks down the street, the bus, the bus stop where Stacy will get off to walk the remaining one and a half minute towards this café, my spot, where I sit so comfortably, pen in hand.

So far every bus has left me empty handed and all by myself, not carrying a single familiar soul face. The magazine girl is cute and all but not as a potential lover. She is in the standing water of girl and womanhood. Maybe she enjoys reading about international politics and the latest massacre, but I doubt it. More like the latest fashion among pop stars or whether her favorite artist prefers boxers over briefs. She looks seventeen, nineteen at tops but then again I’m miserable at guessing people’s ages and have been wrong by ten years or so.

Nonetheless, if I were to ask her now, she would pretend to be thirty-five. It’s not exactly her pretending age that bothers, that sort of desire to make oneself older and more experienced than one is in order to please and impress others, it’s more her arrogance. Looking at her, her naked slim cold shoulders tell me how much better she is.

My astrologer told me in a rather confidential tone after examining my personal chart, looking up from the rim of her round glasses straight into my eyes with a concerned smile on her face, "The problem with you,