Fragments of fiction

‘It was my madness that you took with you wherever you went. My madness left at your feet for mercy.’

All she left was memory. Hauntingly discontent memory. Six years is a long time to move on, not only from love but from the very evidence that you once loved and were loved briefly.

It felt like she shrunk with every passing day and then finally disappeared into nothingness. There was nothing I could do to stop the whole process.

I remember our last few days together, actually not very much together. We lived in the same house and yet two distinctly different worlds. I remember waking up one morning to find her in the kitchen furiously trying to bake a cake, only she couldn’t, not even close. All that showed in the end was a mess of flour, sugar, egg shells and Hershey’s cocoa and her own insecurities and shortcomings, her own frail tiny being working as hard as she could to justify her existence and herself.

Six years down the line she looked far from the girl who once vowed to love me unconditionally.

She looked smaller and smaller at times firmly rooted on her writing desk wanting to disappear.

‘I think I don’t have it in me to make any money,’ she once said chewing on an apple slice dipped in caramel sauce. I thought it was cute.

Nonetheless I took on two jobs. PR advertising was a drug. I got a kick out of convincing people to believe in something or someone that I thought was, quite frankly, a joke. A nobody. An absolute waste of time. It wasn’t a moral dilemma nor would I like to call it unethical. It was just a five year old gazing at the sky and saying ‘Look!’ and everybody saw. Only I realized you didn’t have to be five to do that, you could be thirty three and they would still look. Sometimes I find it incredibly appetizing to do things I hate. It just makes my hatred more authentic. It was how I fell in love.

Meanwhile at the house, she built time around her. She devoured books by the hour. She stopped biting her nails and chewing the skin around them.

She was the kind of girl who drank water not because she was thirsty but out of the fear of developing a kidney stone.

I kept her with me nonetheless. I know now what might be wrong with me, what has been wrong with me for all these years. I probably breed off the wrong kind of things.

Three weeks after she left her memory turned from being a haunting affair to being just a tiny prick. An irritable itchy prick.

Out of compassion I pour myself another drink. I can’t swallow much. Eagles eye me with disgust. My hands start to shiver.

Six years later the winds changed.

No she wasn’t very beautiful or intelligent or smart. She however gave me something to remember on a cold winter night, when I looked outside the window at a city swamped by the night lights and the icy breeze pricked at my skin. That was how random she was. She had bouts of nauseatingly crisp behavior and bouts of madness during which she expected me to keep her company.

She expected me to lock her doors at night because she had nightmares of the house falling down on her sending her into frenzy and out on the cold wet streets.

She’d create quite a noise when she’d walk in somewhere. Never to draw attention to herself though, she never really wanted that. It just came naturally to her like breathing and just about everything else that made her so stunning and crisp.

One Christmas, she chopped off her hair, igniting an aura of rebellion.

Sometimes in the afternoons when I’d boil water for my tea she’d walk in like the wind, grab a knife, chop off a few fruits, stack them up in a brightly colored bowl and leave like she wasn’t even there. Wild like wind and disturbingly precise, there is this gumption of how carelessly certain and adamant she is about everything.

Her absence drove me towards working harder. Hard work is hard work and surprisingly all this starry eyed success took a lot out of me. In the end I was a man, a tired man, too tired to smile or acknowledge his moment of glory.

The day I got promoted, friends and family celebrated at a fancy lounge down the street. As the party got louder and louder I found myself walking away, out of the room, onto the lonely street, turning eastward about a mile away from where I lived venturing out to witness the sunrise in the wee hours of the morning.

Whoever thought of this and I laughed out loud as I saw a tiny speck of orange grow brighter and brighter as it started to embrace the sky.

Here I was, a man too tired to acknowledge his success while on the other side of town people celebrated his success.

I thought of her. There was so much dealing to do. I couldn’t deal with all the dealing.

Flashes of darkness and color blinding me, I fancied not wanting and wanting. I glanced at a page I tore from one of her journals.

‘While you waited upstairs in your pretty dress, life was all that was happening downstairs in that dusty old basement covered with cobwebs. And all this while, if only, if only you’d gotten over your fear of darkness and only if you weren’t disgusted enough to take a crap on yourself, if only you had been brave enough to run downstairs…..it would have been entirely worth it.’