:: Images ::

It wasn't quite the thing to do, I supposed, but I found myself perched by the kitchen window at 2.49 a.m., reading Lolita and ravaging an apple.

My shopping bags were spilled like petty sewage between the threshold of the kitchen and the living room. I was still fully dressed, except my cardigan had joined the pile of new jeans (cheap, factory-quality, perfect for use and abuse), fur-collared coat, woollen throws and faux-wool sweaters (borrowed and bought, with happy gratitude for the former and stingy grudge for the latter), half-eaten snacks and the other odds and ends (keys, another book, ticket stubs, lip-gloss et al) that had jostled their way out of my trusty bag onto the floor that needed mopping.

I didn't care.

The night breeze was a Zephyr song; my bare shoulders tingled. My stance was that of a woman, but my unceremonious enjoyment of my book and my apple was ungainly and childlike. So it was fitting that it was Lolita I was reading; yes, it's Nabokov again: he is macabre but romantic, dreamy but demanding―I could never tire of him.

And then suddenly, at page 22, just before Humbert was to fuck a French prostitute (a nymphet, how pretty!), I got tired of the apple. Its icy tastelessness was starting to numb my mouth, and where I had bitten myself on the lip―an unfortunate childhood habit―was smarting. My father's choice of apples never agreed with mine anyway: I favour the red ones, ripe with yellow flesh, sweet and soft and consistent, while the old man prefer Fiji apples, listless and pink, with white meat and bitter cores.

'Red apples―Royal Gala or whatever shit they're called―they're so sweet, they taste almost artificial. You can't be sure if it's natural,' he chastised me once when I hinted the want of a change.

While I had nodded with daughterly consent, I couldn't help but think―fuck, you're distrusting a fruit?

So I sought out the fridge―it was humming companionably―for an orange. 2.57 a.m. I loved the quiet, broken only by the occasional roar of traffic: souped-up bikes and turbo-charged cars, eating up the highway just as surely as the stupidity of youth is eating up its occupants. When you're 55 and distrusting an apple's nature, for example, you will not be tempted to push your car―as though you're a knight straddled to your steel horse, gallant and grand―to its speed limit at three o'clock in the morning.

(Metal dragons, fly by night:
Carbon smoke and tortured grunts
Speeding crippled to the light.)

I leaned out of the kitchen window and ate the orange. I left Lolita and Humbert's quiet obsession with young girls for a while, because I wanted to think. I have no time to think these days. I am a robotic clockwork of frenzied function, my mind a machined landscape tuned to necessary sentiments. So I just stopped and think for a while, turning over thoughts in my head like a child would seaside pebbles: with careless focus, and always on the lookout for that distant bell of the ice-cream truck.

***

I ran a hot shower because I like the sting of heat on my flesh. My senses are dulled with sleep but their nerve-endings are raw with energy―this is youth, perhaps, this abject disregard of the body's natural needs. Fuck it all. I'm 23. Let me abuse myself: my body, my mind, my graceless feelings. Aren't we all compliant pricks. I've rented this body from the cosmic dimestore―one day it must be returned (ashes to ashes!). And since I'm only entitled to a limited ownership with no warranty, no sir―fuck it fuck it fuck it.

And with all my sincere apologies to Maugham―it was 3.28, and far too late for me to be original: it is only because nature is unkind and has no regard for the immortal longings of youth that I did not light a cigarette.

That, and because I've already hurt my mother enough.

***

The bathroom mirror was fogged over with steam. Did you know―I used to write your name on the mirror, my fingers forming the childish alphabets of your name? S.A.M.U.E.L. I liked the way I could see only fragments of my face through the clarity of your name. Ah, how romantic this sounds on print. In reality I did it without thinking and without fail―at home, in a hotel far away from you, at the hospital even as my kidneys bled and swelled.

Tonight―no, no, this morning―I wiped the mirror clean of steam with a swipe of my palm. Very adult, very sensible, without a trace of romanticism. I hope you're happy, and that your name (gift of god, was it not) will appear in someone else's bathroom mirror, as well as her heart and mind, and it did in mine.

***

Europe―albeit only in three small bits―will come. Let it then; perhaps the wintry sunset and the crumbling histories of the western world, sculpted and built into its architectural cultures, will snap some life into me, and I will come back, infinitely poorer in cash, but eternally richer in memories.

For you: I will attempt to make a carbon copy of the haut mondé for you; of the comely cultures on the colourful canvas you so thoughtfully got for me. Thank you.