87. Wait

We have no companions. We drift, while perfectly still, through years and years of everlasting solitude. No one remembers us anymore, in this room where we have been left aside, mercilessly discarded as if we were past our sell-by date. The colours are fading from us, quietly, lazily, like chalk does from pavement after hundreds of pairs of legs have stepped on it. Only no one has come even close to us for a very long time. We have not dressed a foot the way we used to and we slouch on our rubber soles, dreaming of socks and bare skin and hot rocks fading into hot sand by the beach.

We remain here trapped in memories and thick layers of dust, sharing with each other the secrets of the warm breezes we used to enjoy together, unceremoniously thrown under the bed in a motel room at the seaside; how we used to count the specks of sand caught in each other's fabric, how we used to slouch against one another and peer at the shimmering puddles of moonlight barely visible through the crack under the bed, how we used to listen to the distant call of the sea waves and the echo of seagull cries.

Those memories are forlorn and in our deepest hearts of hearts we know that we have shared them into exhaustion and that we have become too accustomed to this dreadful wait to remember how we used to edge closer together for the night. We have been apart in our patience, close but never close enough to stop blaming the other one for how we came to be forgotten. Somehow through the murky waters of time we have managed to remain here, unmoved, brought together now only to our having belonged to the same person, and it feels like we are the remains of a shipwreck doomed to live in the depths of the ocean.

We are trapped here, deep in an imaginary seabed of wait, and we have lost everything, save the ability to remember, which has at last bought us infinite time.