Parallel noses

A tiny ant is strolling on the window’s screen. Almost like a ghost, unseen and immeasurable. But the ant is looking through the window at an extended view. We see as he sees. His compound eyes are looking at this view from different portions of it at once. The image on the other side of the window is as follows: A woman is spread wide on the floor like a starfish. Relinquished. Piles of books around her head, stand like observatory towers, and a few pieces of furniture and boxes complete this configuration. Her apartment is pregnant with a peculiar silence. A sort of sound that has been not yet understood, that in twenty years, an artist, or a musician might discover for his craft. Or a sort of sound that is ultrasonic which might never be grasped by a human but the ants. It’s twenty past two a.m.

The ant notices a letter that is hanging loosely on the nightstand, signed to Avery Hive.

Avery listens to the humming noise of electricity moving through the wires, like every other evening. She thinks a small critter must be trapped inside the fridge. Because, it’s been a few nights that she is hearing the coded conversation of a small cheering creature, a bird, which is gradually freezing to death in her refrigerator. How did she end up in my freezer? She asks herself. There has to be a secret portal behind my refrigerator that wherever the other end meets, the bird was headed there. Another scenario is that the bird has eaten all the food in the fridge and now it cannot pass through the portal. She goes on. The ant focuses on her hands, In her right palm, there is a piece of paper. On the front side, it’s written; Apples x3, a Straino, Eggs, Rosemary, Butter, Soil for the plants? Call Sunae this evening. The reverse typograph in pale-red ink on the back of the paper is yelling for attention: Yawyna tuoba edutilos s’tahw “What’s solitude about anyway?”

- Avery: Is solitude a big mirror, painted over with a waterfall of emotions?

- Silence: Yes, sorta. Because it’s naked and it’s concleaed.

- Avery: Perhaps, solitude is merely a naked room. Isn’t it? Yeah, solitude is a naked room with no desire to be furnished.

- Silence: You’re not wrong.

- Avery: you know, Solitude is a stupid desire to moon around in places like even to the disposal room — in search for a dreadful thought.

- Silence: a dreadful thought you said?

It was just minutes ago when she had an odyssey in the disposal room. The door to the disposal room is hefty. So, she clipped the door to the magnetic doorstop, and she let a slice of light to penetrate. she kept her breath and stepped on the foot pedal, and as she lifted the trash bag to dump she saw something. Nothing small, or similar to a rat nor an empire of worms, but something as big as the bin itself. As if the whole bin was a person uncrossing its legs just for a moment. This was exactly what she saw. A wind blew, and loosened the magnetic door-stop, and for a moment a primordial fear rushed through her as she ran for the door. All her life she battled against a fear that she could not rationalize. When she stepped outside, her body was as cold as the little bird trapped inside her refrigerator. She sat with her legs wide and leaned on her elbows on the ground, in the middle of the alley. Her mind was a racing car and her vision was a flickering old television screen. The alley was dark with a gloomy tint of blue. A few illuminated squares in the neighborhood made her ask if there’s anyone out there who is also sleepless and she is wondering if they all better go back to bed? She wondered, where do we go when we don’t fall asleep? And she heard the silence whispering: to dangerous places.

- Avery: A dreadful thought I said. I reckon someone is living in the residential bin.

- Silence: maybe a near-dead corps, with his body drained from blood and his mouth filled with burnt coffee… HAHAHA, laughs the silence.

- Avery: I burnt the coffee and browned the toasts, this morning. But… what are you trying to say?

- Silence: you’re going back again.

Avery remains silent and the silence dissolves into the 3:30 morning air.

The question of can you let go of you rasing imaginative free flow thoughts, in lack of distraction and in the darkness of the nightside, in solitude, can we ignore our fears and thoughts and feelings?

Her body is going to sleep soon though her mind stays awake. She tries for half-hour. To persuade her mind. What could be there? Never mind I will wait until morning. That would be the first thing I’II do.

But it seems like she can’t fall asleep. She rolls around. She thinks that this silence has to stop.

This is the eleventh night. She goes by the window, lit a cigarette, looks around for any sign of fishiness. The city is sleeping and the small illuminated squares are going off one after the other.

She puts on her clothes and shoes, and courage.

In the disposal room, she presses the foot pedal gently and looks inside the wheelie bin. She sees nothing special. She runs her hand in the giant bin. “I am touching something meaty, and slimy and yet I am incapable of naming it. She says. Oh my, hair like thin wires, I couldn’t name a thing for what I was touching, so I am leaning over to get an image. On the top of the gaping bin and at this very moment I know that something has changed about me tonight: I kissed the fear good night.”

In the dim light, I try to draw a line of what it can be feeling that way in my head, it is certainly not rotten fruits, nor hair clog, it isn’t leftover bones from a chicken wing. Something slimy it is. And then I see what I see.!!! A big nose with two holes as deep as bottomless oceans burden underneath junks. The nose sniffs me in like a vacuum cleaner. Not giving me time for a second-thought.

……………………………………………………………………..

A cluster of half-human walk like zombies towards me. I feel the squeeze in the tube. The smell of damp clothes, and mouth that never have been washed, liquid yellow drooling all over their mouths. Veins like purple cactus, and empty patches of hair on their heads. they look dead to me I probably look dead to them. Our reality stretches miles to the north and south pole. The man in red raises his left folded fist at the eye-level in front of me, and he brushed his forehead with his right thumb. I say: you gave me no choice. He says you have the choice of keeping it close or open. But if you choose to see what is in my palm you should never speak of it, or you will find yourself in an asylum. What are you people? I said, do you live here all by yourselves? I tried to buy me time. I remember in the school there were phrases like well, as a matter of fact, to look at it the from the perspective of or the truth is. The truth is that they didn’t care about questions. Smell of damp clothes and dirty mouth, urine and nasty green liquor made me puke until I had no water left in my body. I choose to see what’s in your hand. He opens his hand, his palm travels an O shape hurriedly, then comes face down, his fingers all bend in one direction and height as if there are cramped. It was not April to take it for a fool. They took turn on looking into the palm of the man in red, then the man in red fists his mouth, his mouth gapes open, he takes his hand out of the end of his throat. then the man in red cries with a high pitch sound like a new born. The man in purple forces his eyelids open with his fingers, rushing into my face. My interpretation would be open your eyes. They must be delusional, craving for junk. I thought to myself and put on an emotionless face. Show me your hand, I say. He unfolds his fist, and shows me nothing but a tooth in his palm. The man in purple talks a non-lingual sound to me, only long vowels similar to no language. I look them in the eye and say: what am I supposed to do with the tooth? The man in purple hands a spoon, he plays pantomime. he lifts his right hand to take the imaginary tooth, then he drops it on the spoon, he never uses the left hand, as it has bad omens. He lifts the spoon with the right hand. The left hand only flames the spoon and cooks the tooth. He pretends the smoke is rising up into the sky and he pets the smoke in the air, he catches the cloud of smoke and walk them through his nose. His pantomime stands in no motion. The man in red, the man in purple, the man in ivory, and the man in no clothes give me a confused facial expression. In mad state, I say, Smoking the tooth? just like that? Just like I showed you. Says the man in purple. I lift my right hand, take the tooth, drop it in the spoon, with same hand, that is trembling, I hold the spoon, and the man in red fires my spoon into a daze.

Smoking the wisdom tooth is giving her all the wisdom she needs to know about solitude.

In a moment of time, I traverse through my memory of belonging to the womb. It was a universe consisting of me at the center of it. Nothing surrounded me. nobody to talk to, nobody to tell about my experience of existing solely for 9 months. That was my solitude. And one day they separated me from my world. They took me away of my home, the uterus. That day, I cried. I screamed and say I want to go back to the womb. And for the first time I felt the anxiety of being born. The anxiety of existence. I was born into a world of billions-population that nothing stands at the center of it. I kept saying that I don’t want to be separated from the womb, they did not care about my wish, they cut me off from my belly. And dipped me into a machinery glass house.

The man in ivory asks: where did you live after the machinery glass house?

Well, many places, to begin with; I lived with my parents, my father’s house. One day, I was taking a bath with my little brother after school on the day in which the Nanny didn’t come. Because father said: we are old enough to take care of ourselves. Then later in the evening, my father paged my name to his room. I sensed foreboding in my belly. He pointed with his index finger to where i should be sitting down, then I memorized the spot. as I sat down on the bed, an enormous tornado threw me on the carpet. He stood up and shook the same index finger close to his face and he said a few words which I couldn’t hear… I was temporarily deaf. At the age of 12, I was sent to a boarding school, and this place became my home for the next 3 years. I stayed awake most nights because I wanted to listen to the silent hours. When I turned 16, I decided to move away to the next city where my aunt lives. She always told me lots about this city. I took the train and 6 hours later i was there. I started a new life when i wasn’t aware that i walked into the remains of nothing. My aunt and her husband were strange lovers, when they fought, i would say prayers, even though I wasn’t sure to whom i am sending the prayers. I couldn’t go back home and staying was unbearable at my unts. That was exactly when I decided to live in the books. I believe that a part of me will always live there. In search for a reborn, I moved to the other side of the world. But no matter how far I was distancing myself from the past, time was out of joint in my life. Now I’m living in this city that I know no one, and no one knows me. I still stay up to hear the silence, even though I am in the solitude that I have chosen. I thought I’m going to like it more, you know. But I love and hate it. I am afraid that once I embeaced the solitude entirely, someone comes and poke me or wake me up and pull me out of my house and throw me into the machinery glass house.

When I came back to my senses, the spoon was still in my hand so was the tooth. The man in red, the man in purple, the man in ivory and the man with no clothes circled around me while I was talking to them. It sounds mad, but I never felt I ever belonged to anywhere, until this moment.

The man in no cloth says: in the world, outside, we are all living another life… and at nights we live here.