Ace of Spies
Friday, November 6, 2021
“I found it difficult to reconcile success with humility. I tried it first, but it meant avoiding the very essence of my career - total exhilaration and the ecstasy of creativity.” Then the failure happens, the rejection starts and my once wonderful life is over. I tried with all my talent to make a well-designed world, where one can find happiness or at the very least, contentment in a perfectly balanced landscape where design meets desire. I tried to step-out when things got dicey, but one cannot run from their troubles or signs of danger, but alas, time will catch up with you. It always did, and it always will.
“I was so far back in the woods, they almost had to pipe in sunlight.” My despair when I discovered that all I have worked for has come to nothing. I tried to find the beauty in that, but what that is like is when you see an image of water in the desert, and you come upon it, and you realize it is just dry sand. I live my life as a projection, and I’m OK if I don’t penetrate the screen in front of me. “The world changed. Hollywood changed. I think we’ve lost something, and we don’t know how to get it back.”
I walk into a room, and it is full of people I don’t know. Clearly, I don’t belong here. The oddness of having a drink with them, and I think it will only be a matter of time when they realize that I’m a foreigner here, as in, I don’t belong here. “May the wind at your back never be your own.” I think I read that in a fortune cookie somewhere on Canal Street. Or maybe from a Chinese wholesaler selling advice on the side. I should be mature enough to take such a warning before I even entered that room. “The world is filled with archaic objects - mailboxes which look like alarm boxes, banks which look like places to break out of rather than places to enter.” I had to excuse myself, and I entered the restroom and looked at my image in the mirror. I didn’t recognize him, because what I’m seeing is a projection. When I look at a photograph of myself, I can hardly recognize my image. It is always so different from what you see in a mirror and then when someone else captures your spirit - you are definitely not the person. But apparently, you are, and therefore is the rub of the narrative.
Behind my back, they called me the “Ace of Spies,” meaning that they don’t know who I am, and the secret is, I don’t know myself at all. Honesty is a role that I play at that exact moment. When I say “I love you, ” it is only for the passing moment when the cloud goes through the moonlight. Like a vampire facing daylight, I too must pass, and therefore I go back to my well-designed world and try not to look back.