The Intruder

Darling..

 

She looks so frail tucked into all these sheets. Her head, arms, legs, fingers intermingled with linen and cotton and smelling of fabric detergent. Her head heavy, the pillow struggling to keep up against the weight, struggling more to distinguish itself from the white of her skin. The line. Where is the line. Freckles bleed into sheets. She’s changed. It’s hard to remember her as the same.

 

But for him, sitting beside her, on a crooked iron and wood nailed chair ailing with rust, with sunken eyes and skin too dark for a healthy person to have, for him, he still pretends there’s hope. And perhaps there is. Perhaps if he repeats to himself convincingly enough, she may return, to him, before the intruder.

 

Her eyes flicker. Or did he imagine that?

 

Darling, can I ask you something?

 

The side of his face twitch a little in apprehension. When she asks questions like this, he almost wishes that she wouldn’t speak for fear of what she might say just because she can. Somethings are better said in silence. Through looks, through smiles of half-made-effort, through the slight of skin too brief and too insecure to be called a touch. These are how such things should be said. Not through words. Pray not through words. Words get written down on paper, words get passed around, photocopied, signed, translated, misinterpreted and re-interpreted and recorded into numbers on a digital machine flashing green and waiting. Words stick. No. He doesn’t like words and he tells her this through smiles of half-made-effort and the hope he pretends (oractuallyholds) in his eyes.

 

 

Words stick. His smile of half-made-effort says.

 

She opens her mouth, hesitates, closes them, opens and starts again. Words clinging to the sides of her lips, rolling off into weak vibratos that hover in the air.

 

I think it’s time to consider..

 

He looks at her legs, unused for months. Veins that shrivel and curl into patterns of purple and blue, the tribal etchings of the intruder. Not enough red, that’s the problem, not for failure of medication or for failure to notice, not for all the months dismissing her headaches as across-the-counter pains.  The problem was not enough red. The intruder won’t let her have enough red.

 

Suddenly he felt the fury well up. A ball of red at the purple and blue, at the failure of aspirins and tarceva and the intruder and himself and science. Science had let him down and policy threatened to take her away.

 

In incremental steps of courage, he lifts his eyes to level with hers. He was already negotiating deals to unknown persons in his head. His hands shaking even as he curls them into balls to steady. He feels like stage fright in sixth grade graduation when the teacher calls out his name and he wishes that he had his paperclip with him or, less of a conscience. He braces himself for the words that stick.

 

She opens her mouth, hesitates, closes them, opens and starts again.

 

To consider.. some water. Time for some water, darling?

 

He sighs relief. Handshakes the deal in his head away and files it along with the multiple copies of similar deals he’s had to make in these past few months.

 

He knows he’s going to loose, but he’s all in, and he turns to get her some water.

 

 

 

Inhale, so you can read my thoughts

I combine imaginary personalities

and collage together features

to make you up

 

the pretend swallows as difficult as the real

 

I collect lies (like others collect flowers in a basket)

emasculated marching paper soldiers

chained at wrist and ankle in combat boots and shiny buttons

new

but tattered at the edges

because I had cut them with green safety scissors

instead of the red and left a mark

(I refuse to conform)

- you

 

I created you

(with your perfect laughter and sly nod of comfort and -)

to hurt me

 

so I could try nailing tears to a door and capture pockets of what’s fleeting

the fleeting doesn’t stick

into sock draws

pin-point, reference, label and fold

or colour-code like my journal

for when the real comes a-knocking.

 

I filled a glass full of sensibilities and followed it to the end

before I realised it was overflowing

with neuroses

 

I(you) tried to tear apart you(mine)r features and write you(us) into other personalities or stories because

 

I made you up, but you handcuffed me to my own masterwork.

The clock blinks three zero zero

The clock blinks three zero zero in cheap green fluorescents that flash bright and then gone (bright and then gone) against a morning quiet of sleeping bodies outside. She envies them. In dream. And feel the seed of bitter start to take plant all over again.

 
Her head is racing like a hypochondriac on crack in a broken elevator five levels too high and she is afraid to jump because heights were never her strong point and claustrophobia seems more enticing than the other alternative right now. Coffee. Or sleeping pills. Or both. Just to see if the two would cancel each other out. Coffee is too dangerous and tea would be just tragic. But she keeps on hearing it

 
tic tic tic

 
and she doesn’t hear the toc and that’s what worries her.

 
She pulls the fabric at its seams just to see if it would fray. They call it growing up, when wrinkles precede wisdom and sunspots no longer mark beauty but read a braille of life instead.

 
(a unique, it gives her character don’t you think?).

 
Perhaps that’s why she postpones her monthly visits to the dentist and decides to rendezvous with aspirins instead. She wants to keep her wisdom teeth and all its wisdom intact.

 
Tic tic tic

 
goes her head. It’s the ticking that keeps these photographs stuck on her wall like that. It’s the ticking that arranges and re-arranges her books in postchronological order in a fit of nervous post-midnight mania. It’s the ticking and that tiny little beetle under her floorboard that tells her time is racing and she suspects he’s been playing with the notches again because it can’t be racing this fast, but then again, she can’t be sure. Some nights she moves in slow motion, but on nights like these, she’s animation stop. It’s all playwright and stage acting and like Irina in Moscow sleep will eventually desensitise her to the ticking in her head. She can’t decide if this is a cure or a concern.

Procrastination

She raises the glass to her lips and more inhales rather than drinks. Or snorts. You could say she’s addicted because it’s not the type of thing you’d drink if you were in your right mind and the neon on the digital in front isn’t blinking warning signs and certainly not before the reliability of caffeine starts to loose its said reliability and you’re hoping that the smiling man on the front of that tin doesn’t renege on his promise. He doesn’t, and she starts to feel the threat of yet another REM cycle retreat in silence.

Everything is too damn silent. Except the voice of mockery blinking back at her, it hums into her next sip of the glass. She gets up and sachets another caffeine shake and watches it pour in and occasionally out and around the rim of her cup. Sleep in a packet, she smiles, for the creatively inept or the pathologically brain-blocked. She places it next to the smiling man on a tin.

She sees herself on the back of a milk carton. Missing. One brain. Last seen three Wednesdays ago. Wearing motivation and hints of enthusiasm. Please find by Friday, a large bounty applies. May answer to the word: fail.

The screen stares back with blankness, the black dash still blinking in expectation and waiting for that sound of epiphany to shoot it through the deadline. She turns her head.

The cicadas outside and their little freedom songs bring with them the awareness of impending sunlight and its intrusive little fingers. She knows that soon they’ll be snatching at her, pulling her out of the night and its snugness and its promise of time and temporary immunity. This realisation soaks through her until-then intoxicated contentment and her heart pounds a little bit faster and her temples pulse a little bit louder. She grabs for smiling man on a tin and drinks some comfort out of habit. The blinking dash winks and waits.

Dear professor. Under reason, she writes: my brain has recently gone on union strike due to dissatisfaction with certain labour members. Unfortunately this will cause some delay in our progress. As a consequence, I must request special consideration.

Her fingers do the typing and she chuckles a little sarcasm to herself. The blinking dash is happy but she can’t imagine her professor being so. She sighs, signs on the x and folds the blinking dash away. She still has tomorrow, tomorrow she’ll get it done.

Oh my darling clementine

Once upon a time a young girl found and lost a boy called clarity. She named him clementine.

 

Oh my darling clementine. Remnants of you remain clinging to the corners of my tongue and I taste you in haste between moments when my mind cannot keep up with what my mouth wants to say and you appear disjointed, and a little awkward. Occasionally you roll out. Stuck to words that, really, have no meaning to me except that they are being uttered and listened to, or picked up and discarded, and that’s the mockery in you.

 

You leave in fleeting moments. You weave in and out of loopholes like a transient ghost who I cannot remember the face of nor recall the name of but know that I am addicted to. You’re a pure that I’d love to swallow in the pill-full or inject, if I could, so that I would appear witty and funny and confident all at the same time and never leave with bunches of unsaids and afterthoughts in my hand.

 

Sometimes you grace me with your presence. I offer you tea and we converse about the weather and your travels and I ask you to(please)not leave this time, just this once, but you do.

 

You smell of musk and lilac water and other scents that don’t exist in my childhood because, you do not blind me and kidnap me into a yesteryear where you used to take the form of fairy-floss and knee grazes and alligator tears in all-a-plenty. Oh my darling clementine, leave me a trail of forget-you-nots and we’ll call it even (until you return).