‘I want to create a new world.’
Her voice echoed in the empty house; bounced against the blank flat white of her word processor’s screen. She had many worlds, true, but she did not want to write them today. She was bored of visiting. Her enjoyment of worlds lay in their creation: the slow unfolding of landscape and detail until she could creep up to a closed door and know that her world lay behind it. (It would, like all good secret worlds, disappear once she opened the door. But it was the knowing that was enough; it was the sheer bliss that came with knowing that such a world existed.)
It would be a library, she thought. It would be a classic library: crimson curtains, dark wood shelves, a chair upholstered in moss-green damask by the fireplace. And the books! The books would be leather-bound (green and navy and maroon covers, tinged with mottled ivory where the leather had rubbed away) with rough, porous pages that carried the faint scent of smoke and ink. She ran her fingers over the spines and the pages, delighting in every bump and every fibre. She would read, definitely; she would toss herself into the chair and snuggle up with a book—any book—and read the hours away.
But she needed to explore first. She needed to learn every inch of her new library; needed to acquaint herself with it and perform perfunctory introductions (one had to be polite, after all!) so that they would not be strangers. She looked down. The floor would be, was, wooden floorboards, polished, warm to the touch, whorls and loops scattered through the wood in memory of tree trunk knots. It would be cold in winter, though, and so it needed… a rug. A rug, taken from a mysteriously Other shore, stowed below-deck in a solid wooden ship and carried, solemnly, ceremoniously, by the intrepid adventurer-scholar into the library. It would smell faintly of tar and salt—the smell of sea journeys could not be ripped from it by mere carpet cleaning—and of a cinnamon-like spice, sweet and peppery. She patted the rug experimentally. Yes, it would do. It was a brilliantly rich colour, like stars had exploded and stained the threads with star-blood—such a deep, golden colour could not be anything but the essence of stars, or sunrays stolen and pressed into the fibre. She could lie on the carpet forever, soak the dying sunlight from its threads, but the rest of the library needed outfitting.
On the mantelpiece, she placed a tiny clock (unwound; she would not have it ticking while she read) and a glass vase of flowers (curious things; they would open in the morning and close at night as if they, too, slept and woke). Better. It was getting better. She turned around slowly. Tall, dim lamps in every corner, casting the faintest pools of light before the shelves; a low table with a small stack of books (and a tall stack of yellowed writing paper, held down with a fountain pen and a small block of chocolate); large, shuttered windows and a high, arched ceiling with old wooden beams creaking in the eaves. Yes, it was all falling into place.
She lit the fireplace. The air exploded with warmth and she stepped back, memories of the flames tingling on her skin. The room seemed larger now, as if the fire had illuminated corners she hadn’t previously seen. More books! Her feet skipped over and her hands roved over the titles, tracing the gilt letters with a fingernail. She pulled books out, rifled through the contents, breathed in the musty, mildly mildewed smell (it was like Shakespeare, Keats, Dickens in a bouquet; it was an Austen-like Scent of Sensibility). It amused her that she was so averse to germs and yet happily inhaled the microbes that no doubt existed in old books—but that was the romantic in her; the poor, quiet, repressed romantic of whom she was rather ashamed (her brand of romanticism was so syrupy, so absurdly sentimental that she could not help but be embarrassed when it crept out). There was nothing romantic about people sneezing. Books, on the other hand! She moved to pull out another, but it stuck. Its title was blank; her inability to find out its contents drove her mad and so she tugged it fiercely. It slid out with a smooth pop and a clatter like horses’ hooves on pavement. She whirled around to peer out of the window. There could be no horses on pavement here; her library was surrounded by acres of grass; acres of grass and a lake of soft purple water.
When she turned back, the shelf had disappeared; it had melted into a wall of pale blue plaster and the longest, darkest tunnel she had ever seen. Where did it go? And what was it? The servants’ passageway, or—surely not—a tunnel to a basement crammed with… with… dead bodies strung from the ceiling or torture instruments with fresh blood drying or half a corpse or dismembered heads stacked up storeys high or—
Her imagination flailed and fainted.
It was simply a secret passageway, she told herself sternly. An innocent secret passageway, leading to somewhere equally innocent and probably rather dull. (She refused to consider anything else; her imagination was sometimes far too morbid for her tastes.) Was there a lantern she could use? Yes, why not: an old glass and iron-wrought creation that smoked because she had not the technical knowledge to operate such an old lamp. She coughed. The smoke was stinging her eyes; surely such lamp had a mechanism of some sort—a flap, perhaps—to release the smoke? She opened a browser to consult Wikipedia (veritable mine of truth!). Ah. One had to trim the wicks properly; that was doable, easily so. She took a pair of scissors from her desk drawer, blew out the lantern and snipped the wick. There was a little scattering of ash on the lantern’s base—why, she wasn’t sure; ash did not come from lantern wicks—and she blew it away, watching it explode like bursts of dusty doves into the still air.
She held the lantern up and the hallway was suddenly flooded with the shadows she cast. An insect stopped buzzing. She followed its twisting, turning, ever sloping path; ran her hands along the bumpy plaster; and came upon a trapdoor in the ceiling. How quaint, she thought; how very classic. It succumbed to her pushes and she peeked out.
Above her a teal sky was set free, splashing over her like ripples in a lake. She scrambled out and landed on cottonwool grass. It was spongy grass--not unpleasant, but rather odd—and she bounced on the balls of her feet through the grounds, examining flowerbeds with unpruned dandelions nodding merry greetings. They were sweet flowers; curious flowers; petals that curled out to observe passing ants and seeds blowing in the wind. She sat, cross-legged, in front of the flowerbeds and engaged in idle chitchat with every one of them. Did they know that she had a glorious library inside? She had a fire waiting—indeed, yes, a glorious fire crackling like cellophane—and some paper to scribble upon; they were all most welcome to join her. They would shrivel if they were too close to a flame? Ah, that was a pity. It cannot be helped; one must carry on as best one could. Would they like her to pick them, cut them from the ground and keep them in water so that they could at least see the inside for a little while? No; she supposed not; borrowed life in a closed room—as beautiful as that closed room may be—was no pleasant existence. She was only asking, just in case.
She left the flowerbeds with their gossiping petals and skipped around, peering through the windows at her library, until night came out from under each tree and spread itself along the ground. She burrowed herself in the sponge-like grass to watch the stars peek out; to look and look at the burning of ten billion white and lovely candles in the sky. She could almost hear the stars smouldering; curling, twirling, clinking against the night sky like ice cubes chiming in a glass of lemonade.
Her lantern was flickering; the wick was at its very end. She hurtled down the passageway (she was afraid of the dark, even in daydreams) and flung herself onto the sunlit rug, breathing heavily. As she rolled over to reach for the chocolate, the lantern burnt down to the last of the wick, and the room went dark. She peered around and realised just how dark it was. Her room was lit only by the glow of her laptop screen; if she did not touch-type she would have to squint to read the keys. What was the time? Past midnight already! She rearranged the pillows at her back and flicked her lamp on. She wasn’t sleepy yet; she would read until the first faint gleam of dawn knocked on the window. She pulled a book from her bedside table and snuggled deeply into her quilt; her carpet; her moss-green armchair by the library’s fire (perhaps she was more drowsy than she cared to admit); and closed her eyes to read from leather-bound, gilt-lettered titles instead.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Daydream V
If she were awake, she’d wonder why her sleeping form was shivering, swathed as she was in an electric blanket and layers of fluffy flannel cotton.
It wasn’t that she was cold; on the contrary, she was rather warm. Her surroundings seemed to keep the temperatures at a clement mid-twenties (measured in Fahrenheit; such a world would always measure in Fahrenheit). She wished fervently that she were in a world that did not see fluctuation in weather as an enemy! To feel cold or hot would be to know one were alive; to be merely comfortable without feeling content was rattling. She would leave. Where, she did not know, but she would leave nonetheless.
She stalked briskly past walls of gleaming white and aluminium strips. The room glowed, almost from the inside, as if the halls were lit from the mere reflection of white tile playing against white tile. She could not see any sources of light and she supposed that was just how it was designed: eternal light; eternal brightness; eternal absence of shadow.
—Her body cast no shadow. She danced from foot to foot, darted from right to left, eyes trained upon the crisp, smooth, white (how she hated white at this moment!) floor, searching for a trace of herself. She couldn’t find it. She was shadowless; she was Peter Pan without a Wendy to kidnap; she was in a world that had stripped her of her shadow. What world would strip one of one’s shadow?
‘I want a ticket for the train,’ she found herself saying to a station attendant. And wondered: to where? Where could she go that would be different to here, wherever ‘here’ was, with its coldly glowing walls and stolen shadows?
The attendant turned cool eyes to her. She felt herself being watched; being asked to answer non-existent questions.
‘I can’t…’ Her voice trailed off.
‘You don’t have Thought,’ the attendant said, his voice cracking as though it had not been in use. ‘How… quaint.’
‘What is—?’ She stopped. She knew what Thought was; she could sense it. She didn’t know that it would be here. ‘I didn’t want a computer installed in my mind,’ she replied, ‘especially one called ‘Thought’.’
The attendant arched an eyebrow. ‘You won’t be able to survive here without it. Everyone converses via Thought; we type on Thought; we laugh on Thought; your train ticket has been sent to you via Thought.’
‘I don’t care for a machine that encourages me to replace my thoughts with a database of the thoughts of others,’ she said quietly. ‘Give me a physical ticket, please.’
‘Thought bestows us with knowledge,’ the attendant said placidly. ‘Thought gives us the strongest ideas. No brain is stronger than its weakest think.’
It sounded familiar, and she tilted her head to rifle through her memory. ‘That last sentence was a quote.’
‘Such is Thought,’ the attendant said in flat triumph. ‘For every statement you utter, I can bring up on my database a hundred arguments to refute your thesis. For every claim you make, I can prove it or disprove it with statistics, research, data. I have the world at my fingertips. What do you have?’
‘My own!’ She felt like stamping her foot but she did not want to hear her stamps absorbed by the tiles; she wanted to pretend that she could stamp and hear her stamps; she wanted to pretend she had a shadow. ‘I have my own ability—my own will, at least—to think up my own arguments; to do my own research. I may not be good at it, nor will I ever think of anything as groundbreaking as Plato or Socrates, but at least my arguments are mine, not simply platitudes couched in the words of others! You’re not arguing; you're simply quoting!’
‘Life itself is a quotation.’
Another quote. She bristled. ‘A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought!’ she snapped. ‘And that was a quote, too! Because for every meta-quote praising quotes that you can find, there exist a dozen others that scorn quotes.’
‘Everyone hears only what he understands,’ the attendant droned, ‘and that, too, was a quote. I am not ashamed that Thought allows us to access everything; to understand everything. What can you access? What can you understand?’ He pushed a ticket through the glass.
‘I understand enough,’ she said quietly, plucking the ticket from the counter. ‘One may be able to access everything but that never guarantees understanding. There may be people who are able to entertain thoughts without accepting them, but how many people would go through the trouble to forge new ones when there are so many accepted thoughts to be regurgitated?’
The words flew from her mouth and the scene flew from her too (she was sick of arguing with people over technology and its potential dystopic tendencies; she would not do it in her dreams) and she found herself settling in a train seat. Her muscles grew less tense and she melted into the seat cushions. Trains were a dream; she could always relax on trains.
Except on this train.
She stiffened suddenly and sat bolt upright. Something was different; something was—not right. Was it the seats? No, the seats were fine; the seats would always be fine. The windows were fine; the walls; the doors; everything was fine! She fidgeted, crossed and un-crossed her legs.
And the buzzing started; it was a tinny, whining hum floating above her ear. She listened—she couldn’t not listen—and it grew stronger, more pronounced; hums became murmurs became words and she found herself chanting along: buy betty’s baked goods get grime gone now new nylon nets on sale slashed prices betty’s get now baked slashed buy new—THIS TRAIN IS NOW ARRIVING AT: TOWN HALL—need new nails? Nifty Neil’s Nail Salon meets all your nail needs; needs nails new nail—
She threw herself forward, off the seat, away from the loudspeakers. Consider the daffodil, she thought, consider the lily, consider English landscapes with velvet fields and moths dancing upon the sunlit silence; it’s a dream, damn it, it’s a dream: change it! She stared fiercely out of the window; stared into the sun (it was so bright; so painfully bright; the colour of flaming bronze against a cloudless blue-tile sky) until her eyes watered.
The passengers on the train turned blankly curious eyes to her. When had she put passengers in? She didn't recall dreaming them in—had they materialised with the loudspeakers and its incessant ad-chanting? She backed into the train’s corridor and quietly looked at them all through the window, her curiosity dampening any desire to change her dream just yet. They were so still, she thought, so inanimate. It wasn’t the stillness of death; it was the stillness that came with the sheer absence of life and it chilled her.
No, she couldn’t stay. She needed out. ‘Come on,’ she whispered to herself. ‘Change it; change it to anything, please, so help me God, just change it.’
And the window whirled and the people span too; a rainbow of colours and horrid murmurs and blank eyes. It whirled and she became almost dizzy, trapped in nowhere, waiting. And, as if a film projector had jammed, a single clear memory fixed itself in her head and outside of the window, focusing with almost ridiculous concentration on a scene whipped out from childhoods long past.
It was a birthday cake. She pushed her way through the window and stared at the cake standing on the table. She was enveloped by the smells of icing snow upon the white mountain, the aroma of frosted blossoms and candied roses, of petal pink candles and translucent frosting. It was a piece of winter saved from years ago, frost and snowflake and apple and lily-bud. Her finger darted forward and swiped a bit of cream from the side (no one would notice, she was sure) and felt it dissolve in her mouth like a cloud on a summer’s day.
A bell tolled, its peals tearing the air. She jumped, half-believing that the cake was rigged with alarm bells—but it was not, it was simply the doorbell; the doorbell that they did not have in the house of her seven-year-old world… perhaps they had changed the doorbell? But no. Someone was ringing, knocking, pounding at the door and clamouring for her attention.
She bolted up from her sheets and saw daylight streaming through her curtains. No, it wasn’t fair; she hadn’t slept; she hadn’t rested. She refused to get up. The caller could wait; could come back later; could knock the door down for all she cared. She would not answer it. Not yet; not now; not till she had dreams of cake and cream and trainless, gadget-less worlds. With one swift motion she buried herself in her blankets and flung her arm over her eyes as if to trap an image of that cake, in cameo perfection, on the shell of her eyelids.
It wasn’t that she was cold; on the contrary, she was rather warm. Her surroundings seemed to keep the temperatures at a clement mid-twenties (measured in Fahrenheit; such a world would always measure in Fahrenheit). She wished fervently that she were in a world that did not see fluctuation in weather as an enemy! To feel cold or hot would be to know one were alive; to be merely comfortable without feeling content was rattling. She would leave. Where, she did not know, but she would leave nonetheless.
She stalked briskly past walls of gleaming white and aluminium strips. The room glowed, almost from the inside, as if the halls were lit from the mere reflection of white tile playing against white tile. She could not see any sources of light and she supposed that was just how it was designed: eternal light; eternal brightness; eternal absence of shadow.
—Her body cast no shadow. She danced from foot to foot, darted from right to left, eyes trained upon the crisp, smooth, white (how she hated white at this moment!) floor, searching for a trace of herself. She couldn’t find it. She was shadowless; she was Peter Pan without a Wendy to kidnap; she was in a world that had stripped her of her shadow. What world would strip one of one’s shadow?
‘I want a ticket for the train,’ she found herself saying to a station attendant. And wondered: to where? Where could she go that would be different to here, wherever ‘here’ was, with its coldly glowing walls and stolen shadows?
The attendant turned cool eyes to her. She felt herself being watched; being asked to answer non-existent questions.
‘I can’t…’ Her voice trailed off.
‘You don’t have Thought,’ the attendant said, his voice cracking as though it had not been in use. ‘How… quaint.’
‘What is—?’ She stopped. She knew what Thought was; she could sense it. She didn’t know that it would be here. ‘I didn’t want a computer installed in my mind,’ she replied, ‘especially one called ‘Thought’.’
The attendant arched an eyebrow. ‘You won’t be able to survive here without it. Everyone converses via Thought; we type on Thought; we laugh on Thought; your train ticket has been sent to you via Thought.’
‘I don’t care for a machine that encourages me to replace my thoughts with a database of the thoughts of others,’ she said quietly. ‘Give me a physical ticket, please.’
‘Thought bestows us with knowledge,’ the attendant said placidly. ‘Thought gives us the strongest ideas. No brain is stronger than its weakest think.’
It sounded familiar, and she tilted her head to rifle through her memory. ‘That last sentence was a quote.’
‘Such is Thought,’ the attendant said in flat triumph. ‘For every statement you utter, I can bring up on my database a hundred arguments to refute your thesis. For every claim you make, I can prove it or disprove it with statistics, research, data. I have the world at my fingertips. What do you have?’
‘My own!’ She felt like stamping her foot but she did not want to hear her stamps absorbed by the tiles; she wanted to pretend that she could stamp and hear her stamps; she wanted to pretend she had a shadow. ‘I have my own ability—my own will, at least—to think up my own arguments; to do my own research. I may not be good at it, nor will I ever think of anything as groundbreaking as Plato or Socrates, but at least my arguments are mine, not simply platitudes couched in the words of others! You’re not arguing; you're simply quoting!’
‘Life itself is a quotation.’
Another quote. She bristled. ‘A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought!’ she snapped. ‘And that was a quote, too! Because for every meta-quote praising quotes that you can find, there exist a dozen others that scorn quotes.’
‘Everyone hears only what he understands,’ the attendant droned, ‘and that, too, was a quote. I am not ashamed that Thought allows us to access everything; to understand everything. What can you access? What can you understand?’ He pushed a ticket through the glass.
‘I understand enough,’ she said quietly, plucking the ticket from the counter. ‘One may be able to access everything but that never guarantees understanding. There may be people who are able to entertain thoughts without accepting them, but how many people would go through the trouble to forge new ones when there are so many accepted thoughts to be regurgitated?’
The words flew from her mouth and the scene flew from her too (she was sick of arguing with people over technology and its potential dystopic tendencies; she would not do it in her dreams) and she found herself settling in a train seat. Her muscles grew less tense and she melted into the seat cushions. Trains were a dream; she could always relax on trains.
Except on this train.
She stiffened suddenly and sat bolt upright. Something was different; something was—not right. Was it the seats? No, the seats were fine; the seats would always be fine. The windows were fine; the walls; the doors; everything was fine! She fidgeted, crossed and un-crossed her legs.
And the buzzing started; it was a tinny, whining hum floating above her ear. She listened—she couldn’t not listen—and it grew stronger, more pronounced; hums became murmurs became words and she found herself chanting along: buy betty’s baked goods get grime gone now new nylon nets on sale slashed prices betty’s get now baked slashed buy new—THIS TRAIN IS NOW ARRIVING AT: TOWN HALL—need new nails? Nifty Neil’s Nail Salon meets all your nail needs; needs nails new nail—
She threw herself forward, off the seat, away from the loudspeakers. Consider the daffodil, she thought, consider the lily, consider English landscapes with velvet fields and moths dancing upon the sunlit silence; it’s a dream, damn it, it’s a dream: change it! She stared fiercely out of the window; stared into the sun (it was so bright; so painfully bright; the colour of flaming bronze against a cloudless blue-tile sky) until her eyes watered.
The passengers on the train turned blankly curious eyes to her. When had she put passengers in? She didn't recall dreaming them in—had they materialised with the loudspeakers and its incessant ad-chanting? She backed into the train’s corridor and quietly looked at them all through the window, her curiosity dampening any desire to change her dream just yet. They were so still, she thought, so inanimate. It wasn’t the stillness of death; it was the stillness that came with the sheer absence of life and it chilled her.
No, she couldn’t stay. She needed out. ‘Come on,’ she whispered to herself. ‘Change it; change it to anything, please, so help me God, just change it.’
And the window whirled and the people span too; a rainbow of colours and horrid murmurs and blank eyes. It whirled and she became almost dizzy, trapped in nowhere, waiting. And, as if a film projector had jammed, a single clear memory fixed itself in her head and outside of the window, focusing with almost ridiculous concentration on a scene whipped out from childhoods long past.
It was a birthday cake. She pushed her way through the window and stared at the cake standing on the table. She was enveloped by the smells of icing snow upon the white mountain, the aroma of frosted blossoms and candied roses, of petal pink candles and translucent frosting. It was a piece of winter saved from years ago, frost and snowflake and apple and lily-bud. Her finger darted forward and swiped a bit of cream from the side (no one would notice, she was sure) and felt it dissolve in her mouth like a cloud on a summer’s day.
A bell tolled, its peals tearing the air. She jumped, half-believing that the cake was rigged with alarm bells—but it was not, it was simply the doorbell; the doorbell that they did not have in the house of her seven-year-old world… perhaps they had changed the doorbell? But no. Someone was ringing, knocking, pounding at the door and clamouring for her attention.
She bolted up from her sheets and saw daylight streaming through her curtains. No, it wasn’t fair; she hadn’t slept; she hadn’t rested. She refused to get up. The caller could wait; could come back later; could knock the door down for all she cared. She would not answer it. Not yet; not now; not till she had dreams of cake and cream and trainless, gadget-less worlds. With one swift motion she buried herself in her blankets and flung her arm over her eyes as if to trap an image of that cake, in cameo perfection, on the shell of her eyelids.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Daydream IV
The sun streamed through her window, caressing her eyelids, and she batted it away impatiently, burrowing her face in the bedclothes. It poked; it prodded; it rolled her onto her back and pried her eyes open. She stared at the ceiling: it felt suddenly foreign in its creamy peach; different; alien. It was horrible, some days, to wake up from dreams and be faced with the mind-numbing reality of white curtains and peach walls.
A memory stirred. Treacle. She had, she recalled, been darting around a woodland glade in her dreams, where shrubs suspended firm red berries in the air; firm red berries that would burst into a cacophony of treacle-like syrup where the teeth pierced the berries’ skin. It was her daily lament that such berries did not exist in reality; such symphonies of honey and toffee mingled in the one fruit.
She padded to the kitchen in search of breakfast, and came out sucking a treacle toffee instead.
Treacle. She had more of one-track mind that she had thought.
It danced upon her tongue and sent her thoughts into spirals: damp rocks (and crinkling toffee foil; where was the bin?); twisting tree trunks with curious knobby formations (ah, there it was; why did her parents move it?); sunlight scattered on leafy forest floors (it was overflowing now; she should empty it); pale mist that smelt like moss (she would find another bin for her wrapper; she felt too lazy to empty the bin now).
And the pool, glinting outside by the kitchen window, became an everlasting stretch of water, its glassy surface only emphasising its depths. She caught her breath. It was easy—so easy—to simply step back; step away; retire to her room; finish her work. It was easy. It was easy.
—She couldn’t do it. Her feet were rooted firmly, as firmly as the trees around her, in the soft and solid soil, and to take her hands off the jagged rock (how rough it felt; yet how smooth at the same time—as if the water had worn it down and then thrown sand upon it) was unthinkable; it would be like tearing away her skin. It would, she realised with playful solemnity, mean death.
The sun was hot. She did not want to die. It was an interesting line, she thought; interesting of Virginia Woolf to have her character utter those lines just before he committed suicide. And another hazy thought arose—she had Woolf to read, did she not? Did she? She couldn’t see a book here; there were no books to be seen (trees, trees, nothing but trees); she could not have any books that had to be read. Else such books would be here! And they were not. She laughed suddenly; quietly; allowed her laugh to be swallowed by the forest lest she be thought insane. (By whom? It mattered not.)
There were no books, ergo there were no books to be read. There was simply a forest, and water, and she, clad in flannel and slippers. The slippers tumbled to the ground as she clambered up a rocky wall, fingers and toes clinging to the gritty surface. She let them un-cling; she let them slip and she felt herself fall—the trees reached out as if to offer her a hand; she refused; she could take care of herself—and felt the water embrace her so tightly that it almost hugged her bones. She was drenched. She laughed again, shaking droplets from her eyelashes. (The water would cling!) It was crazy, to drop from rocky heights into unknown watery depths; it was sheer madness to swim in one’s clothes. It was ridiculous to simply dive when one could swing from the sky and fly into the water. So! She would swing.
It simply required vines, she thought, running her fingers over the grooves in the trees. One of the two knots on the trunks, when hit, would eject vines just thick enough to easily grasp; vines that were slender and strong and felt like roughened leather left out in the rain. It was simply a matter of locating the right knot; simply a matter of choosing carefully.
She paused. Why did she have to choose carefully? She hunted her memory reserves—why did she feel the need to be cautious? Because… because, she told herself, secret knots were no fun unless there was an element of danger, a hidden trap to catch the unwary. What trap would she have? And had she set a trap before? The only means to find out was by pressing a knot, either knot, and she selected one with gay abandon. Her fingers pressed down upon the hard bark and scurried away; her feet scurried away too, inexplicably, out of sheer habit: one, two, three steps; darted over a pyramid of stones; crouched behind another tree—why? She stopped; waited; it would come. She knew it would come.
And come it did; a colossal roar of leaves and soil and roots flying from the ground, flinging tree branches left and right. For a moment it looked like a hurricane; an explosion of trees; and she worried that she had destroyed the tree and the promise of vines. As the leaves settled, she saw the branches bending, swaying, forming a—was it? It was! A cage, a little cubic pen of folded branches, swinging from a bough.
She clapped her hands and crowed, imagining unfortunate wayfarers trapped after trespassing (for they were trespassing; this was her forest; she did not recall letting anyone in). Fools, to be caught by that knot! She danced around the net to taunt imaginary foe. How clever she was, to dart away in time! Well and good! She recalled the right knot now; she touched it and watched vines unfold from the canopy and brush the ground, gliding like green velvet snakes resting against the sky.
She tugged on one experimentally. Yes, still sound; still strong enough to bear her weight and some. She bent her knees and leapt, hugging the vine to her. She held; it held; she would be fine. Leaves crunched underfoot as she slid off and skipped towards a rocky shelf, the vine neatly in her grasp. It was merely a matter of launching herself from the rock with enough force—and she did so, easily, smoothly (would she could do it so gracefully in real life!), feeling tiny granules of rock clinging to her soles. The vine whipped through the air with such speed that she felt almost stationary, suspended over a stretch of water that was merely a blur. It was merely the promise of water, she realised with slight trepidation; merely a suggestion and not proof itself. And trepidation be damned, she thought… and let go just before the vine began to return to the rock.
She heard the vine snap away as she plummeted to the water (more than the promise of water, surely!) and heard the water snap underneath her (the blur did look so solid from above; it could not sound like anything but a snap). She surfaced; bobbed; paddled to the water’s edge. In the distance she could hear an alarm ringing (she had to go soon; she did not have time for another dip) and she wondered whether she could make it stop from here. She would wait it out. It would stop ringing soon, surely, and she would wait till she were dry and then leave of her own accord (she would not subject her forest to the whims of the outside world!).
She sat, idly sucking berries, feeling her skin tingle as the water dried and melted away. A breeze shuttled through the trees, cutting through her. She reached over the kitchen sink and closed the window to stop the unwanted gust of wind; she would have her world still and quiet for the time being. The leaves stopped rustling and she found herself shivering less. She was drying—no, she was dry. She had to go.
A sly smile played upon her lips. Yes, she would go. She would go and she would draw a bath: a lazy, long, luxurious bath; she would keep it as warm as the forest’s waters; she would daydream there. Reality really was only fun, she reflected, when it could be twisted to facilitate a daydream.
A memory stirred. Treacle. She had, she recalled, been darting around a woodland glade in her dreams, where shrubs suspended firm red berries in the air; firm red berries that would burst into a cacophony of treacle-like syrup where the teeth pierced the berries’ skin. It was her daily lament that such berries did not exist in reality; such symphonies of honey and toffee mingled in the one fruit.
She padded to the kitchen in search of breakfast, and came out sucking a treacle toffee instead.
Treacle. She had more of one-track mind that she had thought.
It danced upon her tongue and sent her thoughts into spirals: damp rocks (and crinkling toffee foil; where was the bin?); twisting tree trunks with curious knobby formations (ah, there it was; why did her parents move it?); sunlight scattered on leafy forest floors (it was overflowing now; she should empty it); pale mist that smelt like moss (she would find another bin for her wrapper; she felt too lazy to empty the bin now).
And the pool, glinting outside by the kitchen window, became an everlasting stretch of water, its glassy surface only emphasising its depths. She caught her breath. It was easy—so easy—to simply step back; step away; retire to her room; finish her work. It was easy. It was easy.
—She couldn’t do it. Her feet were rooted firmly, as firmly as the trees around her, in the soft and solid soil, and to take her hands off the jagged rock (how rough it felt; yet how smooth at the same time—as if the water had worn it down and then thrown sand upon it) was unthinkable; it would be like tearing away her skin. It would, she realised with playful solemnity, mean death.
The sun was hot. She did not want to die. It was an interesting line, she thought; interesting of Virginia Woolf to have her character utter those lines just before he committed suicide. And another hazy thought arose—she had Woolf to read, did she not? Did she? She couldn’t see a book here; there were no books to be seen (trees, trees, nothing but trees); she could not have any books that had to be read. Else such books would be here! And they were not. She laughed suddenly; quietly; allowed her laugh to be swallowed by the forest lest she be thought insane. (By whom? It mattered not.)
There were no books, ergo there were no books to be read. There was simply a forest, and water, and she, clad in flannel and slippers. The slippers tumbled to the ground as she clambered up a rocky wall, fingers and toes clinging to the gritty surface. She let them un-cling; she let them slip and she felt herself fall—the trees reached out as if to offer her a hand; she refused; she could take care of herself—and felt the water embrace her so tightly that it almost hugged her bones. She was drenched. She laughed again, shaking droplets from her eyelashes. (The water would cling!) It was crazy, to drop from rocky heights into unknown watery depths; it was sheer madness to swim in one’s clothes. It was ridiculous to simply dive when one could swing from the sky and fly into the water. So! She would swing.
It simply required vines, she thought, running her fingers over the grooves in the trees. One of the two knots on the trunks, when hit, would eject vines just thick enough to easily grasp; vines that were slender and strong and felt like roughened leather left out in the rain. It was simply a matter of locating the right knot; simply a matter of choosing carefully.
She paused. Why did she have to choose carefully? She hunted her memory reserves—why did she feel the need to be cautious? Because… because, she told herself, secret knots were no fun unless there was an element of danger, a hidden trap to catch the unwary. What trap would she have? And had she set a trap before? The only means to find out was by pressing a knot, either knot, and she selected one with gay abandon. Her fingers pressed down upon the hard bark and scurried away; her feet scurried away too, inexplicably, out of sheer habit: one, two, three steps; darted over a pyramid of stones; crouched behind another tree—why? She stopped; waited; it would come. She knew it would come.
And come it did; a colossal roar of leaves and soil and roots flying from the ground, flinging tree branches left and right. For a moment it looked like a hurricane; an explosion of trees; and she worried that she had destroyed the tree and the promise of vines. As the leaves settled, she saw the branches bending, swaying, forming a—was it? It was! A cage, a little cubic pen of folded branches, swinging from a bough.
She clapped her hands and crowed, imagining unfortunate wayfarers trapped after trespassing (for they were trespassing; this was her forest; she did not recall letting anyone in). Fools, to be caught by that knot! She danced around the net to taunt imaginary foe. How clever she was, to dart away in time! Well and good! She recalled the right knot now; she touched it and watched vines unfold from the canopy and brush the ground, gliding like green velvet snakes resting against the sky.
She tugged on one experimentally. Yes, still sound; still strong enough to bear her weight and some. She bent her knees and leapt, hugging the vine to her. She held; it held; she would be fine. Leaves crunched underfoot as she slid off and skipped towards a rocky shelf, the vine neatly in her grasp. It was merely a matter of launching herself from the rock with enough force—and she did so, easily, smoothly (would she could do it so gracefully in real life!), feeling tiny granules of rock clinging to her soles. The vine whipped through the air with such speed that she felt almost stationary, suspended over a stretch of water that was merely a blur. It was merely the promise of water, she realised with slight trepidation; merely a suggestion and not proof itself. And trepidation be damned, she thought… and let go just before the vine began to return to the rock.
She heard the vine snap away as she plummeted to the water (more than the promise of water, surely!) and heard the water snap underneath her (the blur did look so solid from above; it could not sound like anything but a snap). She surfaced; bobbed; paddled to the water’s edge. In the distance she could hear an alarm ringing (she had to go soon; she did not have time for another dip) and she wondered whether she could make it stop from here. She would wait it out. It would stop ringing soon, surely, and she would wait till she were dry and then leave of her own accord (she would not subject her forest to the whims of the outside world!).
She sat, idly sucking berries, feeling her skin tingle as the water dried and melted away. A breeze shuttled through the trees, cutting through her. She reached over the kitchen sink and closed the window to stop the unwanted gust of wind; she would have her world still and quiet for the time being. The leaves stopped rustling and she found herself shivering less. She was drying—no, she was dry. She had to go.
A sly smile played upon her lips. Yes, she would go. She would go and she would draw a bath: a lazy, long, luxurious bath; she would keep it as warm as the forest’s waters; she would daydream there. Reality really was only fun, she reflected, when it could be twisted to facilitate a daydream.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Daydream III
Her thoughts streamed by as she lay upon her bed, flinching at flashes of light. Story ideas; pain, terrible throbbing pain; a scheme, a plot; plans for tomorrow; nausea, oh, she would be sick; a quote; a pun; an oath to finish reading that journal article—it all rolled about in one dizzying tangled ball of threads till she could not separate throb from thought. The dull agony tingled, neither pleasantly nor unpleasantly, on her mind’s tongue. Her mind whirred, ideas springing back and forth—but their leaps were stilted, tired; her headache was wearing them down.
She felt her right arm, almost disembodied, flap listlessly around her bedside table. What was it looking for? Her mind registered shapes: tissues; her mobile phone; a box of tablets (was that what her hand was seeking? —But no, her hand passed over it); a hairbrush; a pen. Ah. Her fingers clutched the pen, scrabbled for a piece of paper.
Her eye bulged. She could not write now, not with her head about to split and miniature Athena-goddesses ready to stamp across her forehead and plant olive trees in her eyes. (She half thought that such an occurrence would be relieving at the very least; her eye was about to explode and an olive grove would no doubt release some pressure.) If her headache were milder, perhaps…
Her hand reached towards the tablets, crinkled the little foil cells. No. She would not. Her headache was not a mild headache, to be sure, but it was not blinding either. She had only had it, after all, for no more than five hours; her eyes were only watering from frustration at an inability to do than from actual pain. (She did so hate the headaches that brought tears. Her tears incapacitated her; they blurred her vision and rent her thoughts to shreds.) Pain could be—would be—ignored without the assistance of chemicals; pain could be—would be—used to clarify her thoughts; used to quiet the insignificant ideas and bring the core concepts with potent force to the fore.
Indeed, without pain, her thoughts would be much more tangled than they were. Reflection upon pain took up more space in her mind than she cared to admit; she was certain, fairly certain, that she would have plenty more ideas had such pain not existed. Of course, she drew more than enough inspiration from her pain; it produced colours and levels of sensation she had not thought possible. And there was always the blissful feeling of liberty when she woke up without some sort of pain; the world felt fresh and anew—and such feelings spurred her more idyllic stories. Her life would be dull without her idyllic stories.
Write them, said her mind. Write one, if only as a distraction. Write one or capture another from the headache, for did she not gain ideas from the pain? How else, if not in her mind’s attempt to distract her body, could she have seen indigo blue streaking the pale green skies of one of her worlds? From where could she have considered the beauty of a three-sunned planet if she had not seen headache-induced light dancing before her eyes? Fine; she would write! But not Batty; not something she didn’t know; she would capture what she did know and not strain herself trying for something new.
The three-sunned planet was her most stunning creation, without a doubt. It was visually elegant, exquisite and… (she hated to admit) cold. A city carved from black and white stone could never be anything but exquisite and exquisitely cold. The three suns drifting over its marbled grey skies should have scattered some warmth along the black-domed roofs of the city, but the matte, smooth stone seemed to swallow up any heat the suns saw fit to disperse, gobbling it quickly and refusing to share.
She had felt sorry for it, at first. A city too afraid to feel warmth was sad indeed; a city that preferred to project sophistication over quiet affability was less comfortable in itself than it cared to admit. It struck her that the city was like a fallen aristocrat vainly keeping up the airs of his past life: dressing in ragged silks; dining in rooms with velvet curtains. He had come from money; the money had gone—and he would cling to the habits of civilisation in its absence, till it saw fit to return. Money mattered not; he had Appearance and Appearance was enough to at least cultivate the illusion of wealth.
It still had been a glorious place in which to roam. Her feet would stride along the white paved streets and yet not make a click; the stone would—as it did with sunlight—swallow sound. The silence—no, it was not quite silence; sound was so absent that silence was deafening in comparison—had made her apprehensive at first. Silence suggested scrutiny. She did so hate to be watched. It was silly of her, really, but she would always visit wearing black and white, as if the mere colour palette would help her absorb into the very walls; to be an observer of rather than be observed by the poised whiteness of the city and its frosty, judging gleams of black.
And then she realised that the city was scared of her; scared of her realising that its façade was merely a façade. Every time she poked, it would withdraw: passageways would end; doors would stick; windows would have frosted glass. One day, the constant denial frustrated her and she struck out, dashing pavement rocks against the wall. Had she not created this city? Had she not, if no one else, the right to go where she will? The city would do well to learn that its weaknesses made it believable; its flaws made it likeable! Would it stop being so reserved; could it not just let her in?
And it threw herself back at her: a stumbling, flimsy image, but herself nonetheless. She stared at herself and saw, among others, a rock-hard reserve coursing beneath a coldly courteous veneer: the civil nods she gave appeared aloof rather than amiable; the well-rehearsed ‘how do you do’ smacking of affectation rather genuine interest in the other party.
It was, she realised as she pressed her head against the soothing coolness of the pillow, the hardest lesson she had learnt. She was only nine when it had happened. She remembered the mad dash into past memories, flinching at the outward artificiality of her actions. She recalled the oaths she swore: to strip herself of her reserve; to not lift an eyebrow at an apparent etiquette faux pas; to smile, not graciously, but with actual pleasure. She would—and she realised that her nine-year-old self had been horribly elitist; had she always been elitist to the core?—walk with kings, yet keep the common touch.
When she came back to the city, both parties humbled, she found the silence comfortable. It was the relaxed, mutually respectful silence between two who had crossed swords, been cut, and found solace in the thought that they both bled. The stone was still cold and doors still stuck—but she would push; the city would push her and, as maudlin as it sounded, they were, for a while, the better for it.
And here she was visiting the city again, more than ten years on, pressing her nose at windowpanes and tapping her pen against the gleaming black doors. And the city had said, in response: ‘Fine; come in—but in return, publish this.’
She hesitated at the doorway. Fair trade, she thought, one gives; one takes; one apparently becomes more whole in the process. One must have one’s flaws, one’s insecurities. Batty would have his, perhaps, once she wrote her own.
She felt her right arm, almost disembodied, flap listlessly around her bedside table. What was it looking for? Her mind registered shapes: tissues; her mobile phone; a box of tablets (was that what her hand was seeking? —But no, her hand passed over it); a hairbrush; a pen. Ah. Her fingers clutched the pen, scrabbled for a piece of paper.
Her eye bulged. She could not write now, not with her head about to split and miniature Athena-goddesses ready to stamp across her forehead and plant olive trees in her eyes. (She half thought that such an occurrence would be relieving at the very least; her eye was about to explode and an olive grove would no doubt release some pressure.) If her headache were milder, perhaps…
Her hand reached towards the tablets, crinkled the little foil cells. No. She would not. Her headache was not a mild headache, to be sure, but it was not blinding either. She had only had it, after all, for no more than five hours; her eyes were only watering from frustration at an inability to do than from actual pain. (She did so hate the headaches that brought tears. Her tears incapacitated her; they blurred her vision and rent her thoughts to shreds.) Pain could be—would be—ignored without the assistance of chemicals; pain could be—would be—used to clarify her thoughts; used to quiet the insignificant ideas and bring the core concepts with potent force to the fore.
Indeed, without pain, her thoughts would be much more tangled than they were. Reflection upon pain took up more space in her mind than she cared to admit; she was certain, fairly certain, that she would have plenty more ideas had such pain not existed. Of course, she drew more than enough inspiration from her pain; it produced colours and levels of sensation she had not thought possible. And there was always the blissful feeling of liberty when she woke up without some sort of pain; the world felt fresh and anew—and such feelings spurred her more idyllic stories. Her life would be dull without her idyllic stories.
Write them, said her mind. Write one, if only as a distraction. Write one or capture another from the headache, for did she not gain ideas from the pain? How else, if not in her mind’s attempt to distract her body, could she have seen indigo blue streaking the pale green skies of one of her worlds? From where could she have considered the beauty of a three-sunned planet if she had not seen headache-induced light dancing before her eyes? Fine; she would write! But not Batty; not something she didn’t know; she would capture what she did know and not strain herself trying for something new.
The three-sunned planet was her most stunning creation, without a doubt. It was visually elegant, exquisite and… (she hated to admit) cold. A city carved from black and white stone could never be anything but exquisite and exquisitely cold. The three suns drifting over its marbled grey skies should have scattered some warmth along the black-domed roofs of the city, but the matte, smooth stone seemed to swallow up any heat the suns saw fit to disperse, gobbling it quickly and refusing to share.
She had felt sorry for it, at first. A city too afraid to feel warmth was sad indeed; a city that preferred to project sophistication over quiet affability was less comfortable in itself than it cared to admit. It struck her that the city was like a fallen aristocrat vainly keeping up the airs of his past life: dressing in ragged silks; dining in rooms with velvet curtains. He had come from money; the money had gone—and he would cling to the habits of civilisation in its absence, till it saw fit to return. Money mattered not; he had Appearance and Appearance was enough to at least cultivate the illusion of wealth.
It still had been a glorious place in which to roam. Her feet would stride along the white paved streets and yet not make a click; the stone would—as it did with sunlight—swallow sound. The silence—no, it was not quite silence; sound was so absent that silence was deafening in comparison—had made her apprehensive at first. Silence suggested scrutiny. She did so hate to be watched. It was silly of her, really, but she would always visit wearing black and white, as if the mere colour palette would help her absorb into the very walls; to be an observer of rather than be observed by the poised whiteness of the city and its frosty, judging gleams of black.
And then she realised that the city was scared of her; scared of her realising that its façade was merely a façade. Every time she poked, it would withdraw: passageways would end; doors would stick; windows would have frosted glass. One day, the constant denial frustrated her and she struck out, dashing pavement rocks against the wall. Had she not created this city? Had she not, if no one else, the right to go where she will? The city would do well to learn that its weaknesses made it believable; its flaws made it likeable! Would it stop being so reserved; could it not just let her in?
And it threw herself back at her: a stumbling, flimsy image, but herself nonetheless. She stared at herself and saw, among others, a rock-hard reserve coursing beneath a coldly courteous veneer: the civil nods she gave appeared aloof rather than amiable; the well-rehearsed ‘how do you do’ smacking of affectation rather genuine interest in the other party.
It was, she realised as she pressed her head against the soothing coolness of the pillow, the hardest lesson she had learnt. She was only nine when it had happened. She remembered the mad dash into past memories, flinching at the outward artificiality of her actions. She recalled the oaths she swore: to strip herself of her reserve; to not lift an eyebrow at an apparent etiquette faux pas; to smile, not graciously, but with actual pleasure. She would—and she realised that her nine-year-old self had been horribly elitist; had she always been elitist to the core?—walk with kings, yet keep the common touch.
When she came back to the city, both parties humbled, she found the silence comfortable. It was the relaxed, mutually respectful silence between two who had crossed swords, been cut, and found solace in the thought that they both bled. The stone was still cold and doors still stuck—but she would push; the city would push her and, as maudlin as it sounded, they were, for a while, the better for it.
And here she was visiting the city again, more than ten years on, pressing her nose at windowpanes and tapping her pen against the gleaming black doors. And the city had said, in response: ‘Fine; come in—but in return, publish this.’
She hesitated at the doorway. Fair trade, she thought, one gives; one takes; one apparently becomes more whole in the process. One must have one’s flaws, one’s insecurities. Batty would have his, perhaps, once she wrote her own.
Daydream II
Batty was misbehaving.
Not that she could tell, she thought sulkily, for he wasn’t materialising at all. She poked her pen at his blurry, inert form. It rolled over and emitted comic snores. She rolled her eyes. Fine. Today was not to be a writing day. Well and good.
She slumped against her pillows. Was she bored? No! No. Yes. Yes, she was. Damn and blast; she was bored. She felt guilty admitting to being bored; she was always of the opinion that one should never be bored, not with the world and the world of the mind to explore. It was a sin to be bored.
But she was.
It was time, perhaps, to explore the new house; she had not yet had the luxury of examining it, stripping description and memory from the walls’ very pores. It was only last week she had announced to her mother that she had just noticed the exterior walls were brick. Yes. Her tendency to notice things was fading; was she finally calm again? They said she was anxious; high strung; teetering on the verge of nervous breakdowns—yet… she felt no more tightly wound than the next person. Everyone had their little bags of stress and hers was simply difficult for her, personally, to shoulder—she had such sloping shoulders, after all! It was simply a matter of learning how to balance.
Batty, of course, would have tremendous amounts of balance. A supremely stable sense of proportion. He would be level-headed; he would not overthink; he would be gracious and kind to all and mean it.
She thought he sounded insufferable.
Perhaps it were best that he were not written. He was, after all, merely a product of her imagination; she hadn’t yet fleshed him out and there was no need to, really. He could lie, dormant, until she needed him. If she’d need him.
He was too perfect—therein was the rub. She was too enamoured by him at first to truly find out who he was; instead, she had bestowed (cursed, she wondered?) him with society’s ideal traits and failed to acknowledge his weaknesses. Not that she knew what they were. Batty was, she lamented, more a background character than a character upon whom to focus; she knew little about him—and, she confessed, did not yet care enough to find out.
He was not, though, the type to be relegated to the background. She felt he had promise; he was as real to her as her tiny dwellers were—and, just like her tiny dwellers, just as reticent and secretive.
She did not hate her tiny dwellers for their taciturn behaviour, of course. It would much—too much—to ask that the tiny dwellers to make themselves known to people. They would be peppered with questions; prodded; poked; slid under microscopes and exposed to radiation. She couldn’t do that to them. She couldn’t even tell them that she knew of their existence.
Because they did exist; they existed as surely as she did. (She refused to start waxing existential, not during the holidays. She did, however, allow herself a little pause to tell herself a little joke about Descartes and bars.) She spied evidence here and there: a half-dusted miniature footprint on the windowsill; an inexplicable length of string dangling from a low nail; the irrefutable fact that, for instance, honeydew melons were paler closer to the seeds. (They were so because the tiny dwellers injected green dye into the melon, and the dye’s pigments could only spread so far. The orange of rockmelons and, indeed, the bright warm colours of every other fruit, managed to penetrate fruits’ flesh rather well. It puzzled the tiny dwellers so, but no one seemed to mind.)
She knew they were a silly whim. No, she didn’t—she knew that others thought she knew they were a silly whim (how convoluted that felt!); she herself knew that it wasn’t quite a silly whim but a dreadfully logical explanation of the natural world at large. If tiny people couldn’t exist because one couldn’t see them, then, in the same way, established deities mustn’t exist, nor would… newly-born stars. And newly born stars, if not established deities, surely did exist. Things did not have to be seen to exist; they simply had to be believed in. If one believed fervently enough, things came into existence—even if things existed only in one’s imagination. But, as one’s imagination exists… then by absurd logical implications, the things of one’s imagination must also exist on another plane, another distant reality. Reality was only a consensus agreement, after all.
She did wish she could share her tiny dwellers with others but even those who didn’t tease them (the ridicule levelled at her little societies years ago still smarted!) didn’t quite get it; they didn’t quite… understand. They understood, of course, on a very basic level—she believed tiny dwellers existed—but they couldn’t believe themselves, and she found that very odd. Humans were so terribly good at believing in other things: other, less tangible things (like ascribing significance to mere coincidence); other, terribly narcissistic things (like the idea that one can do anything one can set one’s mind to) and yet the existence of miniature people appealed to neither their innate need for causality nor their egotism.
Perhaps, she ruminated, humanity was simply far too self-centered to notice smaller versions of themselves; far too self-absorbed and egotistic to even imagine that there could be anything remotely similar to humans. Everything was explained away by science, by natural causes, by the human psyche—the mere thought of the world working by the hands of something so similar to humans was... terrifying. Science was perfect; science was malleable. The minds of sentient beings (however small in stature such beings were) struck her as far less controllable. No wonder they were so unpalatable to most!
She tapped her pen. If the human race gave up trying to explain the world in ways that allowed humans to control and harness the world, would people actually see the tiny dwellers as easily as she did?
Not that she could tell, she thought sulkily, for he wasn’t materialising at all. She poked her pen at his blurry, inert form. It rolled over and emitted comic snores. She rolled her eyes. Fine. Today was not to be a writing day. Well and good.
She slumped against her pillows. Was she bored? No! No. Yes. Yes, she was. Damn and blast; she was bored. She felt guilty admitting to being bored; she was always of the opinion that one should never be bored, not with the world and the world of the mind to explore. It was a sin to be bored.
But she was.
It was time, perhaps, to explore the new house; she had not yet had the luxury of examining it, stripping description and memory from the walls’ very pores. It was only last week she had announced to her mother that she had just noticed the exterior walls were brick. Yes. Her tendency to notice things was fading; was she finally calm again? They said she was anxious; high strung; teetering on the verge of nervous breakdowns—yet… she felt no more tightly wound than the next person. Everyone had their little bags of stress and hers was simply difficult for her, personally, to shoulder—she had such sloping shoulders, after all! It was simply a matter of learning how to balance.
Batty, of course, would have tremendous amounts of balance. A supremely stable sense of proportion. He would be level-headed; he would not overthink; he would be gracious and kind to all and mean it.
She thought he sounded insufferable.
Perhaps it were best that he were not written. He was, after all, merely a product of her imagination; she hadn’t yet fleshed him out and there was no need to, really. He could lie, dormant, until she needed him. If she’d need him.
He was too perfect—therein was the rub. She was too enamoured by him at first to truly find out who he was; instead, she had bestowed (cursed, she wondered?) him with society’s ideal traits and failed to acknowledge his weaknesses. Not that she knew what they were. Batty was, she lamented, more a background character than a character upon whom to focus; she knew little about him—and, she confessed, did not yet care enough to find out.
He was not, though, the type to be relegated to the background. She felt he had promise; he was as real to her as her tiny dwellers were—and, just like her tiny dwellers, just as reticent and secretive.
She did not hate her tiny dwellers for their taciturn behaviour, of course. It would much—too much—to ask that the tiny dwellers to make themselves known to people. They would be peppered with questions; prodded; poked; slid under microscopes and exposed to radiation. She couldn’t do that to them. She couldn’t even tell them that she knew of their existence.
Because they did exist; they existed as surely as she did. (She refused to start waxing existential, not during the holidays. She did, however, allow herself a little pause to tell herself a little joke about Descartes and bars.) She spied evidence here and there: a half-dusted miniature footprint on the windowsill; an inexplicable length of string dangling from a low nail; the irrefutable fact that, for instance, honeydew melons were paler closer to the seeds. (They were so because the tiny dwellers injected green dye into the melon, and the dye’s pigments could only spread so far. The orange of rockmelons and, indeed, the bright warm colours of every other fruit, managed to penetrate fruits’ flesh rather well. It puzzled the tiny dwellers so, but no one seemed to mind.)
She knew they were a silly whim. No, she didn’t—she knew that others thought she knew they were a silly whim (how convoluted that felt!); she herself knew that it wasn’t quite a silly whim but a dreadfully logical explanation of the natural world at large. If tiny people couldn’t exist because one couldn’t see them, then, in the same way, established deities mustn’t exist, nor would… newly-born stars. And newly born stars, if not established deities, surely did exist. Things did not have to be seen to exist; they simply had to be believed in. If one believed fervently enough, things came into existence—even if things existed only in one’s imagination. But, as one’s imagination exists… then by absurd logical implications, the things of one’s imagination must also exist on another plane, another distant reality. Reality was only a consensus agreement, after all.
She did wish she could share her tiny dwellers with others but even those who didn’t tease them (the ridicule levelled at her little societies years ago still smarted!) didn’t quite get it; they didn’t quite… understand. They understood, of course, on a very basic level—she believed tiny dwellers existed—but they couldn’t believe themselves, and she found that very odd. Humans were so terribly good at believing in other things: other, less tangible things (like ascribing significance to mere coincidence); other, terribly narcissistic things (like the idea that one can do anything one can set one’s mind to) and yet the existence of miniature people appealed to neither their innate need for causality nor their egotism.
Perhaps, she ruminated, humanity was simply far too self-centered to notice smaller versions of themselves; far too self-absorbed and egotistic to even imagine that there could be anything remotely similar to humans. Everything was explained away by science, by natural causes, by the human psyche—the mere thought of the world working by the hands of something so similar to humans was... terrifying. Science was perfect; science was malleable. The minds of sentient beings (however small in stature such beings were) struck her as far less controllable. No wonder they were so unpalatable to most!
She tapped her pen. If the human race gave up trying to explain the world in ways that allowed humans to control and harness the world, would people actually see the tiny dwellers as easily as she did?
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Daydream I
If one were to covertly follow her rambles about the city, one would see her duck quietly into cafés and simply stare, unseeing—her untasted coffee growing cold on the table—at the medley of people and cups and tables and food. And if one were to peel oneself from the gallimaufry and sit at that very table, staring right at her, it would take a good few seconds for her to register one’s presence and bestow one with a civil—if moderately bemused—smile.
‘Lost in thought’ would be one way to describe it. ‘Lost in worlds’, however, would be singularly more apt. ‘Thought’ implies abstraction; her worlds were anything but.
She sat in a café now, her eyes fixed upon a gash in the wall and seeing, not the gash, but over the edge of a world’s waterfall. She gazed into the water; watched the spray fall like scattered stars into its depths; caught her breath; fell.
It was such a peculiar way—and a peculiarly comfortable way—to get to the little village but she loved it nonetheless; the mere thought of a society living in an air pocket undersea tickled her fancy immensely. Better yet was the fact that no one else would find them: who, after all, would consider throwing oneself over the edge of a waterfall?
The waterfall was ensorcelled, of course, but who could know that? Dropping oneself into the waters was like falling into a bed of liquid silk, for the water caressed more than it soaked. It gently pushed her along towards a rocky door, edges worn smooth and flat, embellished only with a brass doorknob tarnished green. She grasped the handle, warm in her palm, and pushed.
It was a heavy door, but it swung open—it would never fail to swing open—and the city sprawled in front of her, lights twinkling a familiar greeting. It was night; she rarely visited during the day lest she come across the city’s inhabitants. She preferred exploration in isolation; solitude allowed her to wander through the empty streets, to quietly poke her head through windows and dabble with the city’s fixtures without disturbing or being disturbed. It was the spectator in her, perhaps; the curious child in her that would toy with everything given half the chance. An audience rattled her; their stares made her feel as though she should perform—or worse, cease her play and ‘behave’. Behaving was so dull! She was so dreadfully well-behaved in real life—courteous to a fault, apparently, though she didn’t see it—and to be so palpably uncivilised, even in an imaginary world, was liberating.
She skipped along the road, brushing her fingertips against the walls. They were, without a doubt, the most interesting walls she had ever fashioned—she always had to remind herself that she made them up—pebbled, mottled-blue, almost rubbery to the touch. Her fingers touched a door and she ducked inside, forgetting in her contemplative glee that people did dwell in the homes of her imagination, even if she didn’t see them.
The house was empty. This was rather good luck. She darted around the room, digging her toes into the shaggy carpet. The underwater trip was fun but, for some reason, it left her socks soaked. She made a mental note to fix that and stood, stock still, in the centre of the room. Something had chimed.
The house sings to itself, she thought suddenly. What kind of house sings to itself?
She listened again. Yes, there it was: a tinkling sound; wooden pins raining against the thinnest pane of glass. But there was no glass in her little city—was there? Surely not. No. The chimes rang through the room again and she followed the tune to the kitchen, where—mystery solved!—the brass taps dripped water in unmeasured whims, playing scales on a xylophone of hollow sink walls and metal pipes.
It was a cosy kitchen. Whoever lived here—he; she knew that the inhabitant was a he—lived alone. (The entire building felt of he; a masculine, gritty he. Not that Spartan décor (or the lack thereof) was an inherently masculine trait—not in the least. But there was an austerity to the house that simply didn’t feel un-he.) There was a kettle, bottle-green in colour, bubbling merrily at the fireplace; a loaf of bread nestled in a paper bag; a knob of cheese twisted in a square of cloth. Her eyes danced; it was so comfortably conventional; so literary in every form. It should be written.
Yes, she would write it. She had almost forgotten. She sipped her coffee out of deference to café form and convention, lip curling slightly as the lukewarm, sugary dregs hit her tongue. Her hand fumbled in her bag as she took another sip (she really must remember to drink her coffee before it cools) and triumphantly fished out her diary to scribble.
She uncapped her pen and plunged into the water again. Her pen refused to write. Biting back clucks of irritation, she let the currents drift her upwards and broke the water’s surface. She floated awhile, dallying between returning to the world (to catch a bus home; she reminded herself that the last bus would come in fifteen minutes) and flitting back to the cavern to finish writing. Just a little paragraph, she told herself. Just a little drabble!
The ink spidered across the page. It read:
She blinked. Batty. She didn’t know anything about him at all; only that he had a penchant for picturesque, rustic table settings. He would, no doubt, spend his nights smoking a pipe and staring contentedly into the fire, thinking very little of nothing at all. And, once evening truly fell, he would drain his glass of… whisky, perhaps, put out his pipe and trundle off to bed. His bedroom, she was sure, was very modest: a bed with dusty blue sheets, a lamp on a rickety bedside table and a pitcher of water on the basin in the corner of the room. She would duck upstairs to check but stumbling across Batty would be awkward to say the least. Her phone buzzed and she realised with mild irritation that she had managed to bring it with her (she so hated it when she brought tidbits of reality into her daydreams!).
She zipped through the water, broke through the surface and settled on the shore of the silken waves; no, settled on the cushions of the café’s chair. How intangibly tangible reality felt! How solid, yet so lacking in solidity, the chair felt under her fingers, like one was simply sitting in the setting of a film’s café rather than a café itself. She half expected to walk out and see the scaffolding of the café’s walls. The whole place was irrevocably flimsy, lightweight, almost non-existent.
The cup of coffee, too, felt light in her hand and she peered into it. Had she managed to drink it all already? Miracle of miracles! She hated drinking, actually; hated the sound of liquid gulping down throats. Hearing people chew repelled her. People were such messy beings; their habits conflicted with her—admittedly overdelicate—sensibilities. It sounded mad; she knew it did. One had to ingest food to survive, but did one have to chew it with such irritatingly loud abandon? (She recalled, idly letting her mind drift, that ‘mastication’ was always mentioned in lists of ‘words that sound dirty but aren’t’—in her mind, loud mastication in public was just as disgusting as the more risqué word it had the tendency to evoke.) She shuddered.
‘Excuse me, ma’am.’
The quietly concerned words jolted her from her reverie. ‘Yes?’ she said, consciously rearranging her facial muscles to look approachable, pleasant, congenial.
The speaker—the barista, she recognised him from last week—looked relieved all of a sudden. Was her facial expression prior to readjustment so terrifying? ‘Is everything all right, ma’am?’ he continued.
‘Oh, yes; fine; thank you,’ she said hurriedly. ‘Fine; fine.’
‘Coffee all right?’ he pressed on.
‘Oh, everything’s fine,’ she repeated. ‘Fine; fine. Fine. Great, actually.’ She sounded like a broken record. ‘Everything’s fine.’ She beamed at him. ‘Is everything all right with you?’
‘Yeah; just saw you sitting there looking a bit annoyed. Company policy to check on all our customers to make sure they’re happy.’ He grinned back, obviously bemused.
‘Oh!’ she said, fighting the urge to laugh. ‘That’s… very good customer service. Um. If you’ll excuse me; I’ve a bus to catch. Thank you for the coffee.’
Annoyed? She? She thought she controlled her expressions in public well enough. Apparently not! The cup fell from her hand into a waiting bin (she noted idly that it was different to the other bins in the shopping centre; a different shade of brown and missing a stripe at the bottom) and she decided that she would give Sebastian the ability to control his external appearances. He would be unreadable; his face would mirror what emotions he chose to display. He would be, at the risk of self-insertion and perfecting self-insertion, everything she was, everything she wished she could be… and more. It would mean simultaneously detaching herself and fiercely aligning herself—and that would be an interesting exercise indeed.
‘Lost in thought’ would be one way to describe it. ‘Lost in worlds’, however, would be singularly more apt. ‘Thought’ implies abstraction; her worlds were anything but.
She sat in a café now, her eyes fixed upon a gash in the wall and seeing, not the gash, but over the edge of a world’s waterfall. She gazed into the water; watched the spray fall like scattered stars into its depths; caught her breath; fell.
It was such a peculiar way—and a peculiarly comfortable way—to get to the little village but she loved it nonetheless; the mere thought of a society living in an air pocket undersea tickled her fancy immensely. Better yet was the fact that no one else would find them: who, after all, would consider throwing oneself over the edge of a waterfall?
The waterfall was ensorcelled, of course, but who could know that? Dropping oneself into the waters was like falling into a bed of liquid silk, for the water caressed more than it soaked. It gently pushed her along towards a rocky door, edges worn smooth and flat, embellished only with a brass doorknob tarnished green. She grasped the handle, warm in her palm, and pushed.
It was a heavy door, but it swung open—it would never fail to swing open—and the city sprawled in front of her, lights twinkling a familiar greeting. It was night; she rarely visited during the day lest she come across the city’s inhabitants. She preferred exploration in isolation; solitude allowed her to wander through the empty streets, to quietly poke her head through windows and dabble with the city’s fixtures without disturbing or being disturbed. It was the spectator in her, perhaps; the curious child in her that would toy with everything given half the chance. An audience rattled her; their stares made her feel as though she should perform—or worse, cease her play and ‘behave’. Behaving was so dull! She was so dreadfully well-behaved in real life—courteous to a fault, apparently, though she didn’t see it—and to be so palpably uncivilised, even in an imaginary world, was liberating.
She skipped along the road, brushing her fingertips against the walls. They were, without a doubt, the most interesting walls she had ever fashioned—she always had to remind herself that she made them up—pebbled, mottled-blue, almost rubbery to the touch. Her fingers touched a door and she ducked inside, forgetting in her contemplative glee that people did dwell in the homes of her imagination, even if she didn’t see them.
The house was empty. This was rather good luck. She darted around the room, digging her toes into the shaggy carpet. The underwater trip was fun but, for some reason, it left her socks soaked. She made a mental note to fix that and stood, stock still, in the centre of the room. Something had chimed.
The house sings to itself, she thought suddenly. What kind of house sings to itself?
She listened again. Yes, there it was: a tinkling sound; wooden pins raining against the thinnest pane of glass. But there was no glass in her little city—was there? Surely not. No. The chimes rang through the room again and she followed the tune to the kitchen, where—mystery solved!—the brass taps dripped water in unmeasured whims, playing scales on a xylophone of hollow sink walls and metal pipes.
It was a cosy kitchen. Whoever lived here—he; she knew that the inhabitant was a he—lived alone. (The entire building felt of he; a masculine, gritty he. Not that Spartan décor (or the lack thereof) was an inherently masculine trait—not in the least. But there was an austerity to the house that simply didn’t feel un-he.) There was a kettle, bottle-green in colour, bubbling merrily at the fireplace; a loaf of bread nestled in a paper bag; a knob of cheese twisted in a square of cloth. Her eyes danced; it was so comfortably conventional; so literary in every form. It should be written.
Yes, she would write it. She had almost forgotten. She sipped her coffee out of deference to café form and convention, lip curling slightly as the lukewarm, sugary dregs hit her tongue. Her hand fumbled in her bag as she took another sip (she really must remember to drink her coffee before it cools) and triumphantly fished out her diary to scribble.
She uncapped her pen and plunged into the water again. Her pen refused to write. Biting back clucks of irritation, she let the currents drift her upwards and broke the water’s surface. She floated awhile, dallying between returning to the world (to catch a bus home; she reminded herself that the last bus would come in fifteen minutes) and flitting back to the cavern to finish writing. Just a little paragraph, she told herself. Just a little drabble!
The ink spidered across the page. It read:
There are very few things in the world that smack of ‘coming home’ quite like an open fireplace, a loaf of bread on the table and a hard knob of cheese nestled in muslin. And Sebastian—Batty, to his friends, who insisted that it was quite the apt nickname—was of the firm belief that every adventurer should come home to such a cosy scene.
She blinked. Batty. She didn’t know anything about him at all; only that he had a penchant for picturesque, rustic table settings. He would, no doubt, spend his nights smoking a pipe and staring contentedly into the fire, thinking very little of nothing at all. And, once evening truly fell, he would drain his glass of… whisky, perhaps, put out his pipe and trundle off to bed. His bedroom, she was sure, was very modest: a bed with dusty blue sheets, a lamp on a rickety bedside table and a pitcher of water on the basin in the corner of the room. She would duck upstairs to check but stumbling across Batty would be awkward to say the least. Her phone buzzed and she realised with mild irritation that she had managed to bring it with her (she so hated it when she brought tidbits of reality into her daydreams!).
She zipped through the water, broke through the surface and settled on the shore of the silken waves; no, settled on the cushions of the café’s chair. How intangibly tangible reality felt! How solid, yet so lacking in solidity, the chair felt under her fingers, like one was simply sitting in the setting of a film’s café rather than a café itself. She half expected to walk out and see the scaffolding of the café’s walls. The whole place was irrevocably flimsy, lightweight, almost non-existent.
The cup of coffee, too, felt light in her hand and she peered into it. Had she managed to drink it all already? Miracle of miracles! She hated drinking, actually; hated the sound of liquid gulping down throats. Hearing people chew repelled her. People were such messy beings; their habits conflicted with her—admittedly overdelicate—sensibilities. It sounded mad; she knew it did. One had to ingest food to survive, but did one have to chew it with such irritatingly loud abandon? (She recalled, idly letting her mind drift, that ‘mastication’ was always mentioned in lists of ‘words that sound dirty but aren’t’—in her mind, loud mastication in public was just as disgusting as the more risqué word it had the tendency to evoke.) She shuddered.
‘Excuse me, ma’am.’
The quietly concerned words jolted her from her reverie. ‘Yes?’ she said, consciously rearranging her facial muscles to look approachable, pleasant, congenial.
The speaker—the barista, she recognised him from last week—looked relieved all of a sudden. Was her facial expression prior to readjustment so terrifying? ‘Is everything all right, ma’am?’ he continued.
‘Oh, yes; fine; thank you,’ she said hurriedly. ‘Fine; fine.’
‘Coffee all right?’ he pressed on.
‘Oh, everything’s fine,’ she repeated. ‘Fine; fine. Fine. Great, actually.’ She sounded like a broken record. ‘Everything’s fine.’ She beamed at him. ‘Is everything all right with you?’
‘Yeah; just saw you sitting there looking a bit annoyed. Company policy to check on all our customers to make sure they’re happy.’ He grinned back, obviously bemused.
‘Oh!’ she said, fighting the urge to laugh. ‘That’s… very good customer service. Um. If you’ll excuse me; I’ve a bus to catch. Thank you for the coffee.’
Annoyed? She? She thought she controlled her expressions in public well enough. Apparently not! The cup fell from her hand into a waiting bin (she noted idly that it was different to the other bins in the shopping centre; a different shade of brown and missing a stripe at the bottom) and she decided that she would give Sebastian the ability to control his external appearances. He would be unreadable; his face would mirror what emotions he chose to display. He would be, at the risk of self-insertion and perfecting self-insertion, everything she was, everything she wished she could be… and more. It would mean simultaneously detaching herself and fiercely aligning herself—and that would be an interesting exercise indeed.
A Meandering Prologue
There was something inherently wrong about writing oneself, she thought grimly, tapping away at the keyboard. It was self-indulgent; narcissistic (not, she conceded, that she wasn’t narcissistic)… and it made one incredibly vulnerable. Once one was on paper, one became someone else—someone to be judged and assessed as other, ‘actual’ characters, were. Is she funny enough? Should she be funnier? And idiosyncrasy! Bane of her life! They said she had idiosyncratic tendencies! What if they were not so idiosyncratic when pinned on paper? (Words, as much as she loved them, tended to flatten things unless the right ones were chosen.)
Of course, she just had to write. She would write, and ‘she’, mildly fictional she, would come spiralling from the page. A bit Blyton-esque, perhaps (her one fear!) and definitely as wet as Beatrix Potter (on tea and scones laced with crack, perhaps) and overladen with parenthetical remarks, but that was how she thought. And wrote. And she was trying to capture the essence of N-thoughts, was she not? She was trying to capture herself as a character, was she not? But where would she start? It was not as though she could, like she had previously, start off by describing an eccentric trait or other—she could not differentiate between those that were ‘normal’ and those that were ‘peculiar’; they were one and the same; stones that made up the wall of her being.
Walls. She could start with description. (She stopped, a mildly amused smile playing on her lips, for this constituted planning, again; analysing the best system, again; considering all contingencies and the best plan of attack, again. She was even—and here, she grinned—overanalysing, not only her story, but herself. What a ridiculous exercise this was!)
Description of what, though? Her surrounds were… chaotic. One of her friends would no doubt collapse in shock. There were no fewer than seven tissues scattered on her desk, one—and here, she lifted one tentatively—with eggshells still nestled inside. (She had good reason for the eggshells: she had been eating hard-boiled eggs in the wee hours of the morning and her bin was overflowing. A quiet voice in her head reminded her that the eggshells were also for her tiny dwellers, her imagination’s little indulgence.)
Her imagination was what worried her, she realised, fixing her eyes upon the ceiling. (There were cobwebs in the corner, spiralling outwards and reaching towards the windowsill, vying for escape. Poor cobwebs; poor dears; spun only to capture; manipulated, twisted, never free. She reached up, set them outside and the wind’s long fingers grasped them and tumbled them over the trees, perhaps—so she would like to think—setting them upon a little cobweb-quest.) Her imagination. Her persistence in anthropomorphising everything and creating tiny dweller communities for every corner. It was such a part of her—such a part of her as a character—that it couldn’t simply be omitted. It would be akin to omitting a tendency for planning, scheming, counting lamp-posts on the road. She scanned her environment with a suspicious eye; she planned her actions with the precision of a field marshal… and she had a little soft, cloudlike core in which tiny people cavorted and capered. She couldn’t deny her character that.
But she, boiled down into a character—or, even, a character ‘like’ her—would have to… share it. Sharing baffled her; her inner world was rich, far too rich, to truly share with anyone. Far too rich for her to capture on paper; ‘twas nigh impossible to describe sunsets so saturated that one could swipe at the sky and flick droplets of colour on the road. She could say they were so vivid, but to capture that vibrancy? To invoke that sense of intensity through description rather than prescriptively ascribing such adjectives (like vivid and vibrant! She spat. Horrible writing) was… impossible. Her world was perfect; such perfection demanded that she select the perfect words to capture it. But such a world had no people with whom to speak—with whom to create such perfect words—and so such signifiers were non-existent.
Worse yet, the settings of her games were the easiest to describe. She could, after all, water it down; make it understandable on reality’s terms rather than her own. But how to describe what she does in such settings? How to describe the little fancies and daydreams in which she indulges? Could she actually share (sharing truly made one feel vulnerable) them, truthfully, completely, without masking parts that she felt were too… special?
No, she decided. She would speak of some little fancies; not share all. And not share one, in particular. She realised that this would no doubt spark some curiosity on the part of what few readers she had (indeed, it sparked questions in herself: why does she not want to share that one in particular? —She refused to answer.) but… it would be a lie, of sorts, to fail to mention it. And so here it was, mentioned and, just as any good character skirts around sensitive topics, she will deflect and consider something else.
She would not, she decided, try to make the character funny. She was not inherently predisposed to humour; she enjoyed it immensely but she was not good at writing it. Trying to make herself funny in text would ultimately fail. Let them laugh at her overdramatics and flippancy but by God, she will not consciously try to be a rapier of wit. Determined attempts at wordplay, for instance, tended to fall flat when she delivered them; she felt that merely thinking of the puns in her head was its own reword.
Her reverie was interrupted by a flutter of family obligations. Of course. That was the story of her life: she’d settle down; decide to start something… and just as she had summoned the nerve to start, someone would ask her to do something trite.
She forced a smile; ducked her head with a courteous nod. She responded briefly, unreadably: ‘all right.’ She could hear the unintended aloofness in her words streaming behind her like a scarf and she mildly regretted that—that selfishness, that disregard for other people’s wants—but only mildly. Let them roll their eyes at her selfishness! It kept her warm; it let her write. Was it selfishness or merely focus and single-mindedness?
She went into her room to dress (surely being sociable was all about dressing; donning different masks and clothes to suit the occasion? How sad. —Even so! All the world’s a stage; she was determined to play her part); grumbled; typed some reflective statement on her laptop. A knock on her door sounded. Yes, she was ready; let her just finish this last paragraph!
She decided, stalking out of her room, that she would contemplate the opening chapter over lunch. Where would she set her character? Perhaps in one of her imaginary worlds. No, a café. Yes. A café would be apt. She smiled to herself as she sat down at the table.
'What's up?' her mother asked.
'Hm?' she replied absent-mindedly, reaching for the jug of water. 'Nothing. Just thinking.'
Thinking was blissful. She scanned over her work in her head, readjusting paragraphs and editing phrases. ('Syntax', she thought, but syntax struck her as such an ugly word.) And she paused, her hand hovering over the platter of cheese. She had left a sentence unfinished. It was a simile; she had left it blank because she couldn't think of anything.
The conversation buzzing around her became muffled. Her smile became fixed and her nods mechanic as her mind rifled through possible comparisons. She didn't mean to be rude; she didn't intend any insult behind her lack of attention. She was simply trying to solve a problem; problems had to have solutions. And an unfinished simile was such a problem—it had to be completed, else it would consume her.
An unfinished simile was as annoying as…
Precisely.
Of course, she just had to write. She would write, and ‘she’, mildly fictional she, would come spiralling from the page. A bit Blyton-esque, perhaps (her one fear!) and definitely as wet as Beatrix Potter (on tea and scones laced with crack, perhaps) and overladen with parenthetical remarks, but that was how she thought. And wrote. And she was trying to capture the essence of N-thoughts, was she not? She was trying to capture herself as a character, was she not? But where would she start? It was not as though she could, like she had previously, start off by describing an eccentric trait or other—she could not differentiate between those that were ‘normal’ and those that were ‘peculiar’; they were one and the same; stones that made up the wall of her being.
Walls. She could start with description. (She stopped, a mildly amused smile playing on her lips, for this constituted planning, again; analysing the best system, again; considering all contingencies and the best plan of attack, again. She was even—and here, she grinned—overanalysing, not only her story, but herself. What a ridiculous exercise this was!)
Description of what, though? Her surrounds were… chaotic. One of her friends would no doubt collapse in shock. There were no fewer than seven tissues scattered on her desk, one—and here, she lifted one tentatively—with eggshells still nestled inside. (She had good reason for the eggshells: she had been eating hard-boiled eggs in the wee hours of the morning and her bin was overflowing. A quiet voice in her head reminded her that the eggshells were also for her tiny dwellers, her imagination’s little indulgence.)
Her imagination was what worried her, she realised, fixing her eyes upon the ceiling. (There were cobwebs in the corner, spiralling outwards and reaching towards the windowsill, vying for escape. Poor cobwebs; poor dears; spun only to capture; manipulated, twisted, never free. She reached up, set them outside and the wind’s long fingers grasped them and tumbled them over the trees, perhaps—so she would like to think—setting them upon a little cobweb-quest.) Her imagination. Her persistence in anthropomorphising everything and creating tiny dweller communities for every corner. It was such a part of her—such a part of her as a character—that it couldn’t simply be omitted. It would be akin to omitting a tendency for planning, scheming, counting lamp-posts on the road. She scanned her environment with a suspicious eye; she planned her actions with the precision of a field marshal… and she had a little soft, cloudlike core in which tiny people cavorted and capered. She couldn’t deny her character that.
But she, boiled down into a character—or, even, a character ‘like’ her—would have to… share it. Sharing baffled her; her inner world was rich, far too rich, to truly share with anyone. Far too rich for her to capture on paper; ‘twas nigh impossible to describe sunsets so saturated that one could swipe at the sky and flick droplets of colour on the road. She could say they were so vivid, but to capture that vibrancy? To invoke that sense of intensity through description rather than prescriptively ascribing such adjectives (like vivid and vibrant! She spat. Horrible writing) was… impossible. Her world was perfect; such perfection demanded that she select the perfect words to capture it. But such a world had no people with whom to speak—with whom to create such perfect words—and so such signifiers were non-existent.
Worse yet, the settings of her games were the easiest to describe. She could, after all, water it down; make it understandable on reality’s terms rather than her own. But how to describe what she does in such settings? How to describe the little fancies and daydreams in which she indulges? Could she actually share (sharing truly made one feel vulnerable) them, truthfully, completely, without masking parts that she felt were too… special?
No, she decided. She would speak of some little fancies; not share all. And not share one, in particular. She realised that this would no doubt spark some curiosity on the part of what few readers she had (indeed, it sparked questions in herself: why does she not want to share that one in particular? —She refused to answer.) but… it would be a lie, of sorts, to fail to mention it. And so here it was, mentioned and, just as any good character skirts around sensitive topics, she will deflect and consider something else.
She would not, she decided, try to make the character funny. She was not inherently predisposed to humour; she enjoyed it immensely but she was not good at writing it. Trying to make herself funny in text would ultimately fail. Let them laugh at her overdramatics and flippancy but by God, she will not consciously try to be a rapier of wit. Determined attempts at wordplay, for instance, tended to fall flat when she delivered them; she felt that merely thinking of the puns in her head was its own reword.
Her reverie was interrupted by a flutter of family obligations. Of course. That was the story of her life: she’d settle down; decide to start something… and just as she had summoned the nerve to start, someone would ask her to do something trite.
She forced a smile; ducked her head with a courteous nod. She responded briefly, unreadably: ‘all right.’ She could hear the unintended aloofness in her words streaming behind her like a scarf and she mildly regretted that—that selfishness, that disregard for other people’s wants—but only mildly. Let them roll their eyes at her selfishness! It kept her warm; it let her write. Was it selfishness or merely focus and single-mindedness?
She went into her room to dress (surely being sociable was all about dressing; donning different masks and clothes to suit the occasion? How sad. —Even so! All the world’s a stage; she was determined to play her part); grumbled; typed some reflective statement on her laptop. A knock on her door sounded. Yes, she was ready; let her just finish this last paragraph!
She decided, stalking out of her room, that she would contemplate the opening chapter over lunch. Where would she set her character? Perhaps in one of her imaginary worlds. No, a café. Yes. A café would be apt. She smiled to herself as she sat down at the table.
'What's up?' her mother asked.
'Hm?' she replied absent-mindedly, reaching for the jug of water. 'Nothing. Just thinking.'
Thinking was blissful. She scanned over her work in her head, readjusting paragraphs and editing phrases. ('Syntax', she thought, but syntax struck her as such an ugly word.) And she paused, her hand hovering over the platter of cheese. She had left a sentence unfinished. It was a simile; she had left it blank because she couldn't think of anything.
The conversation buzzing around her became muffled. Her smile became fixed and her nods mechanic as her mind rifled through possible comparisons. She didn't mean to be rude; she didn't intend any insult behind her lack of attention. She was simply trying to solve a problem; problems had to have solutions. And an unfinished simile was such a problem—it had to be completed, else it would consume her.
An unfinished simile was as annoying as…
Precisely.
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