LIGHTS--CAMERA--ACTION
My alarm is set for 4.30am. I hesitate for a few hours, then open my eyes. My tiny room is a furred sketch, palpable rather than visible. Another hour goes by. I turn on my side to enjoy that side. I open the door of the room of anxieties + spend a long time there. Bored, I enter my small workroom and spent a while powdering a last, the finished upper replete with repressed anticipation standing by. When I open my eyes again it is noon of another day. I just breathe for a while. Two years pass. It is time to get up and I think about that. I imagine myself getting out of bed, putting on my blue cardigan which wraps around tightly and ties at the back. Then my scarf which is actually a shawl, with all the origami properties of that. I spend five hours folding myself into cultures across the globe but wind up looking like a peasant every time. Then there is the door to be opened. I hesitate for a year. I imagine my hand on the gold knob. Turning. Turning. I imagine the edge of the door springing a slat of light. I imagine the hall outside. Another year goes by. It is dark in the room. I am standing beside the bed. I keel over gently, sideways. I am half on the bed (top half, sideways) and half on the floor (legs and feet, splayed). I lie with my eyes open for a few years, thinking about direction and cold.
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5 comments:
But what happened to the purple of yesterday?
A shawl is an armchair traveler. Put it on like this and you’re Middle Eastern. Like this, draped over the shoulder, you’re Indian. You can wear it as a turban. You can wear it like an Irish colleen. No matter which way you wear it though, you’re the mother of the colleen, or the mother-in-law, stolid observer of how its purple edge defines and gives rise to the blocky face whose eyes define and give rise to the blocky body whose secrets have defined and given rise to five sons.
Perhaps one thinks too much alone in the box of one's own mind, so if one could actually converse with those people of those culture, the direction wouldn't be stagnant or cold.
I love the way you wrote this. The years pass as you sleep or think or what-have-you. Very surreal.
Some surprises take years to develop, slow polaroids. Really lovely...among the best I've read. Thank you for this.
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