Puffy-eyed, far from center, with a coffee in hand, she sits, slumped and rumpled before a screen. A screen can portend many things, and this one is no different. It tells the story of 7.5 to 8 hours. Of email. Of listless conversation. Of looking down the barrel of another bleak few days. Of denial. Of improper syntax.
This is the story of your average maiden not-so-fair. There is nothing on her breath but the hush, hush, hush of more words unspoken. In the evenings she tries to consume with restraint and not to regard her phone. A phone is a nightmarish thing, a portal to despair, an offending reminder. Better to put her hands over her eyes, her ears, her mouth and pray silently. And move silently, from room to room, from wall to wall. Eyes roving and then resting on dry knuckles, skewed fingernails. There are sheets of something overlaying her face that she notices in her small lit mirror, also a nightmarish thing, a portal to an insuppressible reality of physicality, like wax figures in a museum. Tonight she is one of those frozen figures, caught, anatomized and splayed for the viewing pleasure of . . . well, no one, but the fine particles of air and dust, resting silently in each plastic pore.
From the sinking glut of a white couch she envisions another inhabitable space. This new space is without strictures. Loneliness emerges from its cocoon to become more sophisticated: an hermitage. A clean desk and a bookcase. A cup like an endless well with no bottom. A life within pages, within the folds of brain tissue where unrequited longing sits, yawns, stretches.
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