The room begins to grow light by increments, transforming in the process. Things not long ago invisible reappear from shadow, details rising from in-distinction. The dormant television set, the pale green of the curtains, the mouldings on the ceiling, breaching like whales from under a dark sea. The ochre-grey gauze of night fades into watery blue, touching her skin with a pale shade, clean, as if she had washed. Save for three hours’ exhausted slumber, she has not slept. Feeling the cool air she looks down at her forearms. The pallor of her skin is chaste, jarring with the stale, unwashed feeling that shrouds her person. She leaves the bed, shaking off the sheet and steps onto the floor then moving in an arc around the foot of the bed and into the washroom. Without closing the door, she turns on the water, ablating herself of the night’s traces. Stirred by her movements and the sound of running water, without awakening fully, he rotates his horizontal body to face away from the door through which she has just passed. He does this unconsciously but seeing him stir, she cannot help but think the gesture is in some way a refusal. This thought absorbs her momentarily, before being dismissed as invalid, incompatible with the dynamic of their relationship. Following this, vacated, her mind turns again to the previous night’s events. She didn’t run, back there on the path. In spite of this, her mind still racing to evade whatever emanation had oppressed her from within that uncertain, inner compartment of her psyche, she had fled nonetheless. It was in her flight then that she felt it, dislodged somehow by the initial, fearfully ambiguous trace, something other, vacant and because of this luminous but itself also implacable, even more so than the shadows that had set her mind surging with anxiety. She does not fear this other vacancy however, quite the opposite. She feels drawn to it, and would seek it out, if she knew where to begin looking. This instant of fleeting serenity was quite unlike anything she has ever felt before. She has known what it is to be “serene”; there are images, other traces she can attribute to the notion: a clear glade, the delicate warmth of spring, sleep or the sound of birds, even searing pain can in certain instances engender feelings not unlike this. But this is different. An un-entered clearing, sealed by intangible bonds, or otherwise her incapacity and sheer incomprehension but which she managed to brush close to nonetheless, close enough to have felt it, even if only for an instant. Suppose this is the calm of a sealed room, uninhabited, echoing. One whose dimensions, colour and scent are unknown and which is experienced rather only in the form of potential, potential she has by way of some glitch become aware of. Albeit this enclave, this opening is bound within her, its aura is somehow other than this, different to anything else she might come across, either in memory or what she thinks of as imagination but began to feel already long ago was already not this. About this she is certain. Although this room, this foreign compartment exists within her, it remains sovereign territory.
Posted on: Sat, 20 Jul 2013 06:31:22 +0000
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