Silence Without: 7wishesIV

Showing posts with label 7wishesIV. Show all posts

Sunday, August 24, 2008

- to walk through walls.

I tell everyone I’ve moved back home, but actually, I live nowhere. Paying for a storage unit to keep my books in is far cheaper than rent.

At night I ghost through the walls of houses and apartment buildings till I find an empty abode. You can tell the degree of emptiness just by breathing the air. The difference between not-home-yet and been-gone-for-a-while-probably-not-coming-back-tonight is distinct. That human smell of warmth and skin sinks and settles over time, without the passage of movement to liven the air again.

In these private domains I poke about, judging the occupants according to what books they have, if they have any at all. I study what photos they choose to display, and look for the photos they close away in albums and drawers and boxes under the bed. I find diaries and read them with only token guilt, and reassess the judgements I have made of these people I have never met accordingly. Sometimes, if I decide I like someone, or am feeling fairy godmothery, I pay one of their bills and hide it away.

I don’t eat their food. That would be stealing. I’m an invader, not a parasite.

My back is ruined from night after night of couch surfing. I’m not comfortable sleeping in someone else’s bed, with my head on someone else’s pillow, where they dream. That’s unhygienic. That’s asking for trouble.

When I slide into this apartment I experience a moment of recognition, yet I've never been here before. I don't know her, but standing in her kitchen, I feel I do. The private space of only one person, one tea cup and one bowl in the sink, one book by the bed, dirty washing piled none too neatly in the corner, underwear drying out in the open in the living room. The assumption that no one else would see these things. Little tics and signs I couldn’t define out loud; I’d found someone lonely.

I can’t find her diary. My instincts tell me she has one. My instincts tell me that, even living alone, she hides it well.

I leave her a big bunch of flowers. Not romantic ones, but lovely ones nevertheless, the biggest most lavish yellow tulips I can find, and a card with only a smiley face on it. I worry that might upset her – who wouldn’t be upset to find someone had broken into your home, even if it was to leave flowers? – but go ahead and do it anyway.

The next day, while she’s at work, I peek in. She’s placed a bowl of milk beside the tulips. I drink it, and because I don’t want to exacerbate any problems with reality she might have, I leave a note: I’m not a fairy, and you’re welcome.

I can’t stay at her place again, I realise sadly. She knows now, and she’ll be looking for signs. Still, I don’t want the mysterious stranger breaking her solitude with flowers only to up and vanish again. I leave a second bunch of tulips, and an ambiguous note stating my intent to disappear. Not that I’d ever appeared to her.

Dammit. I shouldn’t have done that in the first place.

One night, I find a wall I can’t walk through.

My face is a casualty of this discovery.

Intriguing. I touch my nose gingerly. Good thing I didn’t inherit my grandfather’s nose, else the mess would be greater. But...what? Are there other people who can walk through walls? Are we so common this home must be guarded against us? It is nothing remarkable, being one apartment in an old block, with the same floor plan as all the others. Why is it special? Why can’t I get in?

The wall feels like a wall when I tap it, now an unfamiliar sensation. It’s a wall, like...a wall. I can’t get through, which means I have no choice, I must get through.

The ceiling and floor are barred as well. Night after night I return and struggle against this mysterious wall that is so frustratingly wallish, and make some small progress – the spearing of a finger tip here, the depression of my palm there. All my instincts are rendered useless, so I combat them every step of the way, going blind and dumb and slowly. This wall demands I respect it, I learn it, I come to know it well, and one night it all becomes clear, and-

I fall through.

My feet tangle in power cords, I trip over a side table, rip the cable from the wall and land hard on the carpet in an entirely undignified pile. A man stares at me in horror.

I forgot to check if there was anyone home. Whoops.

He surges to his feet, and a great waft of stale armpits roils from him. How did you get in? he demands, outraged.

I gesture at the wall and pick myself up.

But I built them strong, I built them perfect! No one should be able to get in, no one should ever be able to get in.

People get through, I say, unexpectedly and inevitably so.

He looks disgruntled, with hair that hasn’t been brushed and tracksuit pants that he’s grown too comfortable in. It’s a nice little place, and well set up, but it smells like he doesn’t goes out much. I spread my empty hands, a bemused little shrug.

So it would appear, he mutters, and here you are.

I shift uncertainly. This is awkward. I’ve had some near misses in the past, but never actually crashed in front of someone.

I’ll just be going then. Through the door, if that’s okay.

Wait, he says, surprised, and catches himself. I mean, you just got here. It must have taken you a while to get through the wall, I really did build them well. You could tell me how you did it. Or not. I mean, whatever you’re comfortable with. I have Pepsi, he adds, and in him I recognise someone lonely.

I’m not staying, I say, but I’m in a fairy godmother sort of mood. Casting about, I spy a whiteboard on the fridge and on it write an address.

The password, I say, is ‘yellow tulips’.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

- to say what I mean

I say, “hey, guys!”
But what leaves my mouth is a ribbon of yellow, darting about like a blowfly on a string. As we gape, it stills, wilts to a limp little death, and fades.
I say, “what the-“
But what comes out is dirty wool, greasy and crawling with throbbing fluroescant green ticks. As my voice trails off, so the wool slides from one shade of filth to the next, all the way into invisibility.
“!!!” My exclamation is the shape of one red bird of bones, in a leap of alarm.
The people in the office stare at me.
“I’m not doing it on purpose-“ An explosion of lurid pulsating balloon-esque punctuation and the smell of a hot engine on a hot highway on a hot day.
I leave without saying another word.

My first instinct is to call home. When Dad picks up the phone I struggle against a tight throat and hiccup the colour of water tripping in a vast and empty cavern. He can’t hear me.

The doctors I visit are clueless. They provide me with endless hypotheses, none of which offer even the hint of a cure. Camps are formed in the medical field, quickly polarized into whether or not the effect is psychological, physiological or due to external interference. We must run more tests, they state, over and over again. The fact that I stop turning up to any of these tests doesn’t appear to faze them in the slightest, and they carry on without me.

One physicist is certain there’s a wormhole in my head, to another dimension. I joke about singularities and how dense I am, and he never replies to that email (which doesn’t stop him publishing a lengthy article on the topic).

(I send a letter for publication in the next issue, and point out that if he wants to use the wormhole to send a message through, as was his final climatic suggestion, he’ll have to pay the toll, little billy goat.)

(They publish it, sans density joke.)

I’m allowed to keep my job, and never answer the phone again. Surprisingly little changes. The stealth chatter I had via email become bigger and lengthier and just as silly. No one comes my work station to talk to me, except, that is, when they are bored. Then they gather round and beg me to say something, anything. Better than TV. Better than the internet. I tell them I have no voice yet my voice has consumed everything I am, and they shriek at the translucent nautilus that glide out, ghostly and lonely and dropping crow’s eyes.

I stop talking to myself. I didn’t realise it was such a deeply ingrained habit until anarchy-branded turtles swam from between my lips and bumped against the train window. Caltraps and bubblegum fell as I muttered to myself at the intersection of Collins and Spencer. A single resonant chord struck in the tones of a sprained elbow tendon while I watch trams pass and look for familiar faces aboard them. The smell of harmonicas and brine while I browse the racks in a trendy little boutique. All these things are accidental, and draw too much attention.

Mum still calls, because she doesn’t know what else to do. She talks until she has nothing else to say to the empty receiver, knowing I’m listening, full of candy floss and lions, and every time she says goodbye she hesitates, waiting for me to say it back.

Random religious people accost me in the street. Some of them want me to be a modern day oracle, a prophet full of secrets and wonders, and occasionally I am tempted to set up some crazy cult, the Church of Tessaology, and sit around on a cushion eating ice cream all day while my loyal followers build a pod of wooden mechanical hippopotamus so that we may parade around town looking like right tools. Hippolicious tools at that.

Others want to exorcise me. Yeah, right there in the street.

I find myself invited to exclusive functions in echelons of society I didn’t even know existed, much like the Elephant Man was put on display, like a clever little parlour trick. I suppose I am.

Sometimes, I even go as far as to attend these fancy shindings. I learn how to apply eye make-up just to blend in, put them at ease, and then vent my disgust in grand ballrooms and chic penthouses. Disgust has little stamina, and inevitably I end up delivering unto them a soliloquy that even Shakespeare would baulk at, in which is all the frustration I cannot give voice to. I fill their parties with thunderclouds and smog storms with the roil of stale oil and melting polystyrene curling in their delicately powdered noses.

The invitations stop after a few stunts like that.

I stop seeing my friends.

There’s no point. A one-on-one meet up is too much work for the other person; holding up an entire conversation on their own and me only being able to answer yes/no questions, and being able to ask none in return. I give up on groups – I was always the quiet one on the outer, now I’m even further removed from that.

No one can decipher all the nuances of my exhalations. I know, because I am me, and they confuse me even when I know what I am saying. It is an entire new and uncertain language, and no one spends enough time in my presence to justify learning it.

My entire emotional spectrum falling out in rainbows for all the world to see, I’m as transparent as I’ve never been, but I can’t ask for the time, I can’t whisper a snide comment, I can’t shout a warning or tell someone they’ve dropped their ticket, I can’t announce this pizza to be exactly what I need, I can’t tell someone their taste in TV is appalling, I can’t sigh with content at the first mouthful of tea from the first cup of the day, I can’t correct someone on the movement of the continental plates, I can’t congratulate you-

It’s an external synthesia of the subconscious, one supposed specialist says. It’s beautiful.

No, I say, the mournful cry of the wandering albastross drawn in water-coloured grass, it’s lonely.

My blog fills with spam-like posts; the debriefing of the day, inane observations, and my half of every conversation I couldn’t have. And I thought I crapped on too much before. There are few people who can sate my demands for email, the only form of communication left to me, and fate conspires to have them go on lulls simultaneously. Unsurprisingly, I start developing carpal tunnel.

At night, I lie in bed and sing to myself. I watch the colours and shapes and ideas that thread from my mouth until I’m too tired, and fall asleep with all my unspoken words pacing, restless and unheard, through my mind.

When people tell me to look on the bright side, I roar at them, and a monsoon flood of dried chilli blinds them. Then I go back to writing what I want from the deli in clear precise letters. They’re used to me there. They almost know my order by heart: 200grams of gypsy ham, some home-made pate, sundry others. Food for one.

In this movie, I can’t help but laugh, and my laughter is a fountain of warm sparks and the smell of marshmallows and woolly dinosaurs, swiftly damped to the flat odour of wet concrete as the rest of the audience turns to glare at me. I hunch in my seat and pull my scarf up over my mouth. Worse than a mobile phone, that.

Afterwards, as I’m leaving, someone touches my arm. There’s always someone coming on with oh hey, you’re that girl with the thing, right? Do something! Like the Elephant Man. Like a parlour trick. Like I owe it to them.

I turn, my I’m-not-a-friendly-person face on, and she smiles at me awkwardly. I hand her a sheet of paper I keep in my pocket – it’s too old and crease-torn, I need to make a new one – and watch her read my FAQ. Yes, I am. No, I won’t. Thank you for your co-operation.

She holds up one finger and I wait while she fishes about in her bag, because in her face I can’t read any hunger, no expectation of free entertainment. She hands me a piece of paper, soft with the same wear and heavy handling as mine.

It reads:

Hello, my name is Shelley. I am deaf. Please be patient and enunciate clearly when you speak to me.

I can read lips.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

7wishes Table of Contents

The stories of 7wishes were written to keep my head above water, posted to alleviate the loneliness and isolation of nightshift, and have moved on from their humble bloggy beginnings as these things are wont to do.

The collection has been gussied up so as not to be an embarrassment in polite society and is currently represented by Sally Harding of the Cooke Agency (Canada).

7wishes

for a day when the gravity is turned down
for a pony
for a day in which we are only allowed to talk to strangers, and are not allowed to acknowledge anyone known to us
for real true amazing sleep
that there is a little door in my room, only big enough to crawl through on my belly, with paint so faded and peeled it is no colour, it is all colours
for silence
for them to finally drop the bomb

7wishesII

for a tree to climb
for photosynthesis
BAMF!
for a white knight
for reassurance
for just once chance to see
to hear

7wishesSpecialEdition

for a bigger, better, blimptastic balloon

7paintingfiascos

7wishesIII

for a world without secrets or strangers
for a rock to hide under
to save the world, one light globe at a time
for foresight
for the world to respect people on nightshift and during the day just stop it, seriously now, we’re trying to sleep
for consequences and crocodiles
for earthquakes

7paintingfiascosII

7wishesIV