The only way to see a blackened object in darkness is to imagine the hiding light.
As her activities sprang from one object to the next (as not to engage in objectless thoughts - these stroke the deepest fears in her), she envisioned herself as a writer typing down all these narrations – setting the mains charger of the old mobile, patting the unfluffy, forget-me-not, headache-bestowing pillow, laying down on the floor, head in her hands. When she was to fall asleep, would this writer within her be alive and awake to scribble off how and when she fell asleep? Would the writer awaken just before she herself rouse from slumber? In that case, her in-writer had never slept and didn’t that naturally imply that she too had never slept?
She let the notion sleep. If it waked her up in the morning, it was destined to survive; if she did not recall it at dawn, then she didn’t. Period. She wouldn’t even remember she had an idea to remember, now would she?
Only she would not awaken that morning.
The night was still-born in the presence of the saucy street lights. Cars flashed by in a dimension outside of the peeking window. She could yet force her will upon her body and not waste any more precious moments in trying for sleep. Her gaze strolled to the nearest cabinet, dusted with books, clean from glasses of champagne.
Books? She had no need of those swollen papers roaring, preaching, shrieking high-blown and high-pitched phrases that would never fit into the vast parameters of her life. Hell, her own persona wasn’t full enough to fill that blank cosmos. All books could do was deafen her to life’s heeds.
There were objects in the room – fashioned in a cubist manner - but no objective idea, no clean-washed thought, and certainly no clear-shaped feeling. The latter came in the most morbid forms that diverted her from life’s simplicity. It made her mind run riot with its own existence and significance – it crawled on clouds, stalked surreal pictures, and groped for reality where there was none. She had to live now but who could define such a short-written word as ‘now’?
This century, now, for all its clean pragmatic ethics and cut-short stories was no more than a whitened front put up by politicians, screen-players, and common conversionalists alike. Truly, this century had to be filled with wordy, literary words cramped into simply structured sentences. Unlike this one.
Yet simplish words were staccato, presto, a cry, a shrill sense while longish sentences were plain music – fruitless pianosheets with no symbolical code parched into their tiny, diligent notes. The former were destined for leaders, the latter left on the pages of age-old poetry. But only poets read poetry and she certainly didn’t qualify as one.
Still she hated simple truths – they left her wanting, more so – lacking.
Her mind desired solid, definitive facts to hold onto as facts provided all imagination. Facts were long, bulging with terminology, and always so illogical in their pure statement that she could twist and turn them until they fitted her preferences.
But simple truths, oh, no dice here. They hurl at you with their raw strength and suck out of your marrow all your achievements, your glory, and level your mind to that of the simpleton witty student jesting with his classmates.
She would never speak a simple truth, she promised herself.
That’s why she was never to be called a genius as she never uttered one. She could never engage in small talk or take a writing assignment lightly though she knew words witheld or words too readily given up to the outside world put an unimaginable strain upon her conscious being. She couldn’t help it – she ate words for breakfast and slept on baby sheets with the alphabet sprawled upon their fabric.
Back to the books. She might have skipped a motivating title, a depressing melodrama, or a short story that was bound to read her to sleep. Yet her eyes – as much as they could discern in the dusky room – found nothing of interest. And she couldn’t bring herself to reread one book – it would be like reliving a life and dying a death, a forewarned and unheeded death, then plunging back into reality. When one reads a book for the first time, he does it for the book. Second time is for the author’s sake and only at the third turn does he read it for himself. She didn’t want to do anything for herself that night. She never wanted to acknowledge her ego as it lived fullier, more, longer than she ever could. Indeed, what an egotistic, care-free ego.
How foolish she was to think that Life would willingly come to her side. Like a Bacchanic whore disguised in noble garments, Life wandered from one soul to the other, always feasting, ever tiring, always leaving them with a tail of ‘less’-es, never returning. Souls lived continually and ceaselessly in Death; Life was the spare room they designed for their own conscience. They and they alone decided what function to grant to that room – to sleep unremittingly in it, to contemplate from its barred windows, to ease their natures and instincts in its holes, to prepare in it their nourishment supplies for the endless journey ahead. They could destroy it, rebuild it, discard its walls, let its windows fly open.
No books, or you’ll get fat.
An idiotic thought. Perfect for not thinking.
Silence stilling her mind once more.
In all truth, there were moments when the buzzing of a vacuum cleaner upstairs sounded to her like the humming of a dry waterfall, or the annoying snow – the tyrant of the trees in the backyard - covered itself with some distant, pantheistic importance. The moments when her head was as clear as her heart was empty. Though these moments were in short supply.
She would gladly trade her sleep-indulged nights for such moments, gladly give in to insanity if only it would consent to shine upon her being. Same went for any physical illness or any material bondage or, at the very least, mental fetters imposed by exterior forces. All such torments could give peace to her quivering senses.
Her life was not her own. She couldn’t possibly fill it to the rim with her protuberant wounds, blowing joys or extended philosophies since she didn’t feel them interiorly. Tears took on significance only in the presence of another’s gaze. A smile at the mirror was forcing the mirror to smile back, hence it was your own forced lonesome smile.
Should she wake up tomorrow – no, this morning? Wake up for what? To what alarm? when her soul was deafened and her eyes turned to some impossible part of her, unrealizable in her weakened mind?
She curled her body in a ball under the sheets and let the madness of vacuum leak into her thoughts. Drain me.
And she never woke up.
The morning never came –
- as the TV of the neighbouring medical student, who was to finally get his degree today, blared about the unexpected, short eclipse of a huge fallen star that had shot between the Earth and the Sun. Such an unprecedented, egotistic, care-free ego this star had had.
