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.
No comments:
Post a Comment