the fatwaif diaries

the workings of a wandering mind

Saturday, April 09, 2005

1/32

There is a little half-empty apartment, dusty, cobwebbed, overrun by lizards. Or maybe not because most lizards prefer lived in homes. This one's desolate. It's been abandoned for six months now.
In the corner are unwanted shoes of the girl who lived here. Shelves of her books and bills.
Shampoo bottle half-full - the old brand she doesn't use anymore. The threadbare orange pull-out, which, if were a talking sofa, could tell many tales.
The bed she slept and wept in, mostly alone. The walls that contained her thoughts, letting them expand and fill the rooms, one by one, until the whole house became her mind.
The rusty blue refrigerator continues to make a racket that nobody but the spiders and big and small black ants can hear.
I'm wondering if spiders or ants hear at all? But I guess that's a matter for entomologists and ENT specialists or a three-day conference of the two.
This, is merely a matter of memory - how memory can tug at the heart causing the most visceral, unscientific pain, until tears fall without reason. The truth is she feels more than she thinks and when she's not feeling, she's thinking about feelings, or feeling her thoughts the way the blind read Braille.
In this case, she's contemplating the flat down the road she doesn't take anymore. She passes it everyday, wondering how it's doing, knowing that it will be a little more rundown today than it was yesterday, planning to peep in, but almost scared (and irrationally so) of what she might find.
It's now a martyr to the cause of independent living. And the overgrown bed of white lilies just outside the door no longer have any flowers. Only out-of-control leaves in a dark green protest against the way she upped and went without a thought.

But the cup-runneth-over kind of happiness makes it difficult to think. The brooders are always melancholic remember? Giving up solitary dreams and confinement so that she could come home to someone who would listen to her sleeptalk each night and tells her about it the next morning was easy. So easy that sometimes it seems like a betrayal.