My Kind of Twisted Sunshine

I found the ideal guy. Took me long enough, for sure. But I now know who he is. Thing is, he doesn't know I exist. Even worse, he probably never will.

I mean, what can you expect from someone like Marat Safin? And I'd be doggoned to let this fixation rule over my waking life like some loser stalker type. Or, for that matter, a giggly schoolgirl with a crush on some blond boybander (a lapse in judgment I can only attribute to the inevitable onslaught of raging teenage hormones).

But still, I know that if I adored tennis for the sake of the game, then I would come to know true love in the person of Marat Safin. After all, only a true lover of the sport would be able to fathom the depth of that pure, undulating genius. The perfectionism that drives him to such incoherent ebbs in an otherwise perfect career. No other player has been called the "purest physical talent in the history of the game," and this comes from a sports journalist-cum-raving-Marat-lover-slash-hater.

It's not only this, of course. I'm a newbie tennis fan, having been introduced to the sport by Jub, my uber tennis junkie of a housemate, last year. And when I first saw Marat play, it was understandably the physical presence that got stamped in my mind. He was so beautiful; he was just oozing with pure magnetic appeal, you know? But at the time I never ascribed something more fundamental to the impact that he channeled across that tired media known as the idiot box.

Simply put, he is poetry in motion, and then some. For a guy his size (he's 6'4"), it's almost unbelievable how his powerful form moves with such grace, making it look easy to sometimes "mess with the laws of physics." But even more than this, after reading countless interviews of his, I find the things that go on upstairs infinitely more fascinating than his brilliance as a player. Maybe it's because it all starts there. After all, genius stems from the brain, even if the field of intimate knowledge is in athletics. What I find exceedingly intriguing is his capacity for imperfection in his perfectionism, and the ensuing suffering he endures warring with his inner demons over things that an ordinary player would shrug off in trifling consideration. His pursuit of playing "perfect tennis" has led him to falter in the face of imminent victory. His one true enemy is his own self, and on court he berates himself for the tiniest, seemingly inconsequential errors he made, sometimes launching into dazzling displays of unbridled fury. For such a lyrical player in that his physicality is as precise as it is overpowering, he's not very consistent, and his losses could be debilitating in their protractedness. But the tennis world is not at a loss, coz when he's got his A-game on, then you would see something special happening to the game itself.

It's a given, Marat is a godsend to the world of tennis. But for me, he's more than that. He's my construct, the standard by which I think I'll measure future prospects against. No, seriously. If I can't have Marat ("Oh please, Lord, let him be my destiny".. *crossing fingers*) then I might as well have someone who approximates his fine attributes. ("Hah! Not so tall an order--no pun intended") Okay, so maybe I'm asking for too much here.. Okay, okay, so maybe I'm asking for the impossible: drop-dead gorgeous plus athletic skills plus brains/razor wit. Damn, and I haven't even gotten to character traits.

But racket-mangling and chronic model-dating aside, my kind of guy can be someone with quirks like the next guy. I say quirks, not fundamental infirmities such as being an asshole or a chauvinist pig. Hell no, not even if you had a face and body like Brad Pitt's. Now, if you were actually Brad Pitt, that's a whole different story and I should be getting your number... (Ahahaha...)

But Marat, he's the real deal. Because he actually gives new meaning to the word "inspiration." He raises the bar for being someone who doesn't compromise his own standards for himself, who actually acknowledges his human frailty and is even humbled by it, even at the height of his superstardom. He's got his own philosophy about things, and he can be very unequivocal about life and human nature and one's place in the cosmos. He says a lot of things, but he's not full of himself. He's a spiritual person, and he's Muslim, too! (could I love him even more than I do now?) He's as philosophically poetic--and dry-witted--as they come. And he reads Lenin. How sexy is that? Heck, what 26-year-old do you know reads Lenin when they could be partying out all night and blowing moolah on big, fast, expensive things and generally living life in the fast lane? Okay, so he may in fact be multi-tasking even as we speak. So damn what? He's beautiful, he's young, he's successful. He's also a tormented soul. Passionate, tempestuous, never in the middle. Never wanting to be mediocre. Just like how anyone should be, when you think about it.

Admittedly, given his issues and intermittent madness, one can see he isn't the perfect specimen of male human existence. But for me, he's the standard, and I wouldn't want him any other way.