There was a glass of red wine in a small, dark colored glass sitting the sill of the bathtub. It didn’t tip or shake, but it was visibly unstable—temporarily and, for the moment, perfectly balanced on two uneven surfaces. The light was even and yellow across the room, tossing dark shadows behind the corners of mirrors, windows and tooth brushes.
“The clumsy architecture of our happiness is only based on my ability to manage the seemingly unending vastness of my own jealousy, of envy.”
The dialogue was quite sudden and unprovoked. It caused a stir in the room. The particles in the thin curtains adjusted to this new environment, swaying slightly in the wave of frequency, stretching out to fill this new space.
He had thick, dark features. Hair, beard, eyebrows, eyes. All of them were burnt and dark. They stared into the oddly placed mirror. The mirror was hung from window to wall, but too high to seem normal—or, at least, unnoticeably placed. The mirror was, in fact, placed noticeably higher than most and only reflected a person from the top of the shoulders and up.
It also reflected the tiles in the shower behind them—they, too, were noticeably different. The yellow light scattering across the room was no longer as even as it had originally appeared. And, in fact, they too had some odd quality to them. Their nature of oddity was a bit more subtle than the mirror. Perhaps it was a trick in the light or maybe a trick of whiskey. Either way, the tiles were odd.
“Just because we are both lost. Just because we are both alone. Just because we are both lost and alone doesn’t mean that small commonality will save us. “
This time, he sighed and waited for the room to react once again. A barely visible film swarmed over a small, oblong circle on the mirror where his breath reached the mirror. Much unlike the mirror and the tiles, this reaction was almost unnoticeable as if he truly were lost, as if the way back to this bathroom was much further than the distance between his mouth and the reflective glass of the mirror.
He did feel, then, the consequence of the water in the sink, of the closed white door to his right. It stayed in its place and seemed to communicate that there was no chance for divine intervention. No beautiful creature would open the door and hold out its hand. It would not open up the cabinet and crawl into a forest and it wouldn’t have long, wavy hair. And it would not hold his face and it would not kiss him on the mouth.
The door, in its own nature, remained closed—absolved to serve as a disappointing token of reality—none of which was altogether too peculiar when he allowed the moment to pass. Moments later, this only seemed particularly insignificant. It was only an annoying distraction, like a bug on a paper plate.
“Because it is not required of loneliness to be lost but the truly lost are always alone. That is what defines being lost because to be truly without direction will always mean to be entirely and absolutely alone.”
Michael Meeze
January 5, 2012
I envy your ability to capture, so vividly, the essence of any environment.