'A Little Life'
#5, inspired by a devastatingly beautiful book, which I have yet to finish but need a moment to breathe and cleanse.
They all—Malcolm with his houses, Willem with his girlfriends, JB with his paints, he with his razors—sought comfort, something that was theirs alone, something to hold off the terrifying largeness, the impossibility, of the world, of the relentlessness of its minutes, its hours, its days.
‘A Little Life’
Today was the first time she had ever cried in front of her.
‘Did she really fucking cry for a man?’ She thinks to herself.
This is her worst nightmare. People have always told her to grow up and tried to fix her, she would always respond with angry, valiant middle fingers sticking out next to her thighs and scream in a voice audible only to her. ‘Fuck you!’ she would say.
As she scrolls through mundane, self-absorbed updates of her friends and celebrities, images of her deformed shadow surface before her eyes.
Alone in the corner of the bathroom, she could barely see her own famished figure illuminated by a slight ray of moonlight leaking through the blinds. She squatted on the cement floor, chin on knees, arms wrapped around her shins. Naked and ghastly, she knew she had been abandoned, forever.
‘When was that?’ She asks herself. When her parents first separated? When her mother went out drinking with her new boyfriend and left her alone on New Year's Eve? Adolescence? College? Post-graduation? She quivers at the last thought and brushes it off swiftly. She can’t recall the timing, but the very memory trigger of that forbidden past is enough to run a shiver down her spine. She had locked herself in that fetal position for a long, long time, refusing any form of rescue until the first rose-pink light of dawn woke her from exhaustion. Grief is a strange thing. You get addicted and will give up almost everything to submerge under, to indulge in, to never stand up from - vertigo.
She was everything she had, and she had always done everything to protect their relationship, to seal their unspoken bond, no matter how selfish, absurd, possessive or manipulative she had seemed to outsiders. She was her first and last life-saving straw.
Her world trembled when she saw her tears today. This was a woman who had never cried about herself, about her parents, about her father, about her. Today she cried for him. She will always hold a bitter grudge.
The only thing she can do is type and type and type, as if channeling her inexplicably weighty emotions into words on screen would serve as a means of catharsis. To her surprise, it has worked.
042020 / IF
