0.00
(0 votes)
You must login to vote
|
|
|
Dabve, alone in bed, snug as a turd, still single at thirty-six, played with himself. The low sun shone like a peeled orange through the open window. Outside this open window of his neatly arranged bedroom six floors up, the earth rolled. There was not much to do once you had finished, at least that is how you felt, until you stirred yourself through some animal necessity, and did the washing up.
An instinct of homeliness had made him paint the walls when he first moved in. It was two years before he had a doorbell installed. It made him feel old, especially when he rang it himself, just to hear it. Sometimes you felt you should buy a new suit, and very occasionally you did, when hung over.
You could always look at yourself if you liked in car windows as you passed down the street anxiously. And you wondered at what speed you were ageing. Then to be honest was as hard as ever.
Each morning the ride to work on the crowded train standing. The easier thing was to read the paper. Or on a fine morning you could observe the city as it passed, looking down from the embankment. The city changed but never seemed to age.
There were things about her that he liked well enough. But it was not enough. You could not love her.
At the end of the day there was a drink waiting, and cigarettes, that much was a given. You could not easily call that happiness. You would cook a meal and eat it watching the news, and the evening would stretch out.
(You had written something a long time ago about a sort of person who wasted his life and who would one day realize he had wasted his life and that that would be a kind of damnation, not mitigated for being expected.)
This city was a home; its vastness, its inconstancy and indifference were akin to a grant of limitless freedom. You would follow its roads, its railways, its canals and rivers seeking to explain it to yourself, happy collecting odd pieces of knowledge.
There were occasions, you thought always there were too many, when in some archaic fever, the brain lit up with frissons of lust, and reason like a bird tapping on a window pain, the transaction never longer than an hour, you found a canvass on which to daub unlasting images of love.
And how you hated things and how you loved them! That was all history in the twinkling of an eye. As the bird flaps its wings I reached into myself and recoiled with each beat of my heart.
It is what you never heard yourself say until you exited this life. In what pain! In what coils of pain! You could not in the end move at all! That was it. It had been a long self-crippling.
He does not hear this. It is not true yet or at all, as the case may be. But now it is not true. He may sense, just, the hook is in. He may sense his movement is as he wishes.
Jesus the fisherman.That is a blessed thought at times such as these, he speculated.
You simply did not know. There was a number of ways out of this for the time being and you were by and large grateful for this, the more so as you grew older. But that was not enough.
|
this is