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.

concrete-coloured world

It feels cold, oppressive, yet somehow fragile and naive. The leaves are grey; the earth is still, the sky is vast and unknown all around me and above me. Images seem to reflect on every surface, sounds seem to reverberate, although the silence pounds against my eardrums and sucks all noise out, all air out, leaving me instead with a stifling void and utterly breathless. The space seems endless, like a torrent of images soaring past me, through me, under my feet and over my head with the speed of a motion picture. I can focus each picture separately; each fragment of my surrounding seems to belong to itself as much as to the whole it helps create.

Everything around me is colourless, expressionless, hollow and alone. I am the only speck of colour—a bright red, almost ostentatious against the bland landscape. I try to retreat into myself, to make my presence in this surreal place less noticeable, but somehow it seems as if I am meant to be the focus point of an over-sized photograph. I’d like to see this photo that includes me from the outside; I’d like to be its subject but also the one to take it. The perspective is blurred up, smudged, and I feel as if I am a blotch of ink on a finished canvas.

I am misplaced, the misfit, the one who does not belong to this magical world of being and not being, this world that holds no other living creature. It feels like walking into a mysterious place, like stumbling upon a secret, like wandering through different dimensions of life. It feels as if I have been born several times, like being born in birth, being born in death and dying in birth.

It feels like sleepwalking into a black and white universe.