If you can’t expel the demons, then they eat you from the inside out. I think the word fester is most appropriate here. I remember this summer, when i was 13 and i got a stack of books out from the library. Before that i was never a big reader, i don’t really recall finishing a book. But that summer, as i lay on the deck, book planted on my lap, in that sweet summer dusk; i fell in love with reading. i ripped up a book the other day. The first book ever. I saw it on his book shelf and i just snapped. How does one move past these demons? They haunt me you see. Every day, they –what was the word? Oh, -fester, in my head. I ripped it up with dry eyes, eyes so dry they were sand. As the pages of it fell to the ground in bits, my hatred of him filled the room. Swelled in the book, as each particle, each substance fell, along with it my sanity.
Then to hear him come up those stairs, to hear the sound i’d been longing for all evening. It literally threw my body into a state of shock. Referring to earlier in the evening, i sat on my bed sobbing in the company of an alcoholic. An angry one at that. I guess they are all angry in a sense, that’s why they drink, however, she has all the fiery, female anger of a feminist, juxtaposed with all the pig headed, ignorance of a misogynist. To turn to my flatmate, to let her heatedly agree with my anger and to watch me destroy his possessions, only went to occasion my imminent break down.
As i stood in his room ripping up that book, a book i had only ever hated, only ever eyed with a great contempt. I watched him in my mind’s eye, marching happily into my room, reading facts about my star sign, this book was the very pinnacle of all the pain that rumbled and hissed at me from the near future. The smile on his face echoing the smile he beamed as his fingers typed so steadily on my laptop that after noon; as he causally announced that he had invited his new friend to his sister’s 21St. The foresight i often exhibit, the very thing people describe as a gift, usually only gives me the mere crumbs of a wisdom, to foresees the onset of something terrible.
I have never been one to let things be. I cannot, it goes against my nature. Sitting at a restaurant, while stars twinkle down on the two young lovers, blushing, as if it were their first date. Dark oranges and reds encompass the walls, a gentle waiter and a ruby rung elephant join the stars, in sleepily, smiling down. Yet still, my mind eases not. Thoughts float, more so, thoughts tear at my red and orange blanket, like little demons, telling me it isn’t so. A lover does not leave you abandoned, even once, even if it’s not what you think.
Like a natural disaster, this man made volcano, erupted, leaving an aftermath with each lover blowing ash from the other’s eye; or into the other’s eye. Sitting in a room, in the museum, on a week day afternoon; experiencing the effects as if there were a volcanic eruption in this city i live in. I couldn’t help but stare out of the assimilated window, with its assimilated view of my local neighbourhood, and view this landscape the way I did from my primary school. Sitting on the grassy banks at lunch time, feeding the seagulls, looking out over mission Bay, out into the water, with the smell of freshly cut grass framing my picture.
Sitting in my room one night – one average night, same night sky, same tired routine, the idea of being a number in paint my numbers life, troubling my mind again. Two lovers cried, cried of the heart ache and cried from fatigue. He said he fully understood and saw me in my innocence now, as if he had never in the past. It is hard to get into someone’s head what you are thinking, when all you are, is in the grips of sadness. A sad smile crept over one lover’s lips and i heard my words as if another spoke them : i swear you caused all this bad blood between us, just so one day you could sit here like you are now, and like you are now, tell me there is too much bad blood between us.’
Two lovers, the very same as you or i, lay in each other’s arms one night, using the sound of their rhythmic breathing to cut through the density of the heavy night. One lover turns to the other, and in a voice so soft, you could have sworn it was never said, asked ‘ Why don’t you like to be kissed?’.
