2

The people, who knew of him, in the closed garden and the tiny huts, often wondered why someone like her, and some, like him, would have spent company.

We spend each evening together, sometimes from afternoons, well into the night.  Only when he calls. A reason for calling, first, he was outside the hut, with some men, joking and laughing and introducing himself to my cleaner, in my last days outside, as I let him in each time he calls, and wait inside when he doesn’t. He was a smiling apparition and ducked his tall head under the door following the cleaner to have some free tea with her and meet me in my rightful place as householder.

“It would be delightful to meet him, and talk, he does watch so much TV, and spends time in the library, that he is learning, so much, so I have told him you are free next evening.”

Introspective, everything in ordinary life seems absolutely trivial. The cleaner’s life was trivial looking, and as we sat opposite each other, he on a chair, me on the sofa, she swept the wooden floor with a broom. I asked:

“Is an original thought, original because you’ve never thought or seen anything like it, before? But after, if you find someone else had the same thought, would it still be original?”

“In your isolation and innocence, all will be purely original.”

“And is what I just thought, original in itself?”

“It is original in itself, I have no memory or experience of anything similar.”

He has broken legs. I am stuck and caged.

Instinct conquers rationality.

I’m in a great depression that hasn’t been recognised. The two ages of delirious progress and dark feeling melt into a modern psyche.

            A technology that imprisons and free. Chokes the skies. Faster and faster into oblivion we fly!

Product, product, trade and war.

Sometimes, I feel displaced, often I have to sit there, while he stares, waiting to take my eyes off him, trying to take them to the television, and talk more. It feels a long time. Flash, flash, the advertisements go, with intense sensations, and sells everything to us.

But I liked his eyes. They were deep. When he frowned he looked deep. When we sat for silences, we stared deep. Most times, there, he said nothing.

           

 A black primal hunger in him takes over.

He would start picking what programmes to watch, if I didn’t hate the thing, and I am mistress of the house.

He made temples sink into the sea, and built for me a mud hut. I wanted to huddle into him for warmth.

His eyes were become animal. Black clouds gather outside. Outside, they cover their skin with blue tattoos, they drink blood. Hunger takes over.

“I don’t know.”  He says when he’s tired.

==

His body is brick and steel. I hint, and the hints are quelled.

He gets nasty, if I dare to hint.

“I do not want what I have seen in the world.”

He stares from the sofa, I curl one ribbon in burgundy, and then the next ribbon in scarlet, wrapping them individually round the coffee table, in direct, closest to the minimum millimetre spaces beside each other.

“White, white skin, that can never hold colour in…”

Inside is everything that cannot be seen.

“Oh, please don’t look into my face!” I squealed and pulled my head back, and screwed up my eyes.

I don’t divine the power in the man, I don’t understand. Big thinking powerful man, as thin though as a birch tree, head lolling over his shoulders, big piercing black gaze.

He liked to smoke and it made the air stale. I took one smoke.

“See you like that, or are you miserable about it?”

           

“Hmmmm…”

“Real, absolute misery, can only lie in women.”

He gave up on the heavy task of speaking, and stared at the light while hours of my own silence, watching him, passed by. Sometimes I had to sit still, with back straight and teeth biting my tongue, because any noise to his sensitive ears, in a bad mood today, grated like metal, he said, drawn across his mind.

The evening news is on. I always like this screen switched off, and I switched the sound off, when he is there, but he has it play on, I suppose so the silences between us aren’t so bad.. He does some strange air punching, towards it, so I switch the sound on. There is a war beginning on the other side of the world.

“Nothing really matters. Existence is a contest between life and death.”

“Civilization can only occur and develop in a abundant and temperate conditions. That place is dry desert. It can’t hope to get better, it will crumble beneath it’s own pathetic need for what we have, what it can’t have…and it will die to have.”

All these sorrow mongers. Men who invited disaster and hit themselves with it, more than they realised.

I had adorned myself at times, at the beginning, but new jewellery on my breast, or make up on my face, made him remark, huskily, and always rudely, in a childish manner, so I’d take down my pendant or wipe my face, a little upset, but he said nothing so bad, turned quickly bright, and then made the evening light.

“Some have said I’m ugly.”

He groaned loudly, and then whined as he stood up and cried, almost a shriek;

“Ohhhh! Leave me!”

==

Cold and unforgiving was becoming more usual in him, than talking.

            He will get close to pumping out fierce anger and its fumes, fill me in, if I get back to the strange, talk where I say I am dead. Imploring before an empty man for love, just makes you love your own emotions most, and stick to them as opinions, all opinions overrule with emotions. We think to fall in love, first, and we go for it, act after act. Improvising between the rules.

“I do not want what I have seen in the world.”

There are places to go and I don’t want to go to any of them. I want you.

==

Too much of him, only in my mind.

“I cannot stop the passing of time.” He said.

“We can make ourselves.” He said, when I wondered about marriage. I was wide-eyed.