Written by I stood up to go somewhere, but now I do not know where it was, or what I was going to do when I got there. There’s the door I opened and closed, built by my grandfather’s friend and ‘shipped’ on an old donkey cart, repaired many times since, and still holding.
I crossed it, walked over the cat even, a cat with dark scary eyes, cold even. I crossed over it because I am tired of kicking it, it likes to be kicked. Every time, it runs back and snuggles on my foot, that scary black cat with white fur patches. Behind the door was someone’s bad idea of a ‘cat potty’, a small carton that once held cooking oil cans, now half-filled with soil to give it an actual feel. I ignore it every time, but I do not, I can not, I try to, I try to not look at it, but I do, always. It is a bored cat that has few rats to chase, I suppose, and its bowels might be quite easy to clean if it does not worry of its delicacy, it must be a boring life, but the cat rules, and we men must obey and serve at her behest, or when we think she does.
The room was built many years ago by a man who was once young, like me, now an old wiry man who walks with a limp and leans on an aging stick. His hands are rough, because I have met him and had to shake it, his hand. He looks at me and I look away, my reasons are simple, I do not will to intimidate the man on who’s supposed genius I trust the roof to hold, the walls to stay, the floor to survive and the windows to open. Okay, maybe he does intimidate me a little, what if he made mistakes, and now, when the roof falls, or the walls give way as I slumber, or the windows refuse to open when my claustrophobia kicks in, I have to suffer for them?
Death, the death, because there is nothing like it. When the walls crumble, but I forget things. I had two rabbits once, live ones, young cute things I was bound to destroy. I always peeped to see whether I could find them doing the ‘nasties’ but never did. Poor things, they died, I did not kill them, okay, maybe I did, but not intentionally. But they died anyway, and I dug two small holes and buried them after I read them their last rites, I even made a small cross from twigs and ‘planted flowers’. Rabbits, living things, dying things.
I am standing here, heading somewhere I cannot remember. I can’t ask myself ‘Where were you going?’ because then I would not be referring to myself in first person, and I might think myself mad, like I always do. So, where were you going? You jumped over the coffee table, brushed past the seat, ignored the hanging on the wall of an actual hanging. Poor man has a noose, and its the moment right before they kick the stool, artists be mad, as people who rape grammar would say. Did you see what I just did there? I just wrote a sentence that can mean two things if you read one word like a gangster, its either an ambiguity or a pun, you decide. Love, it crossed your mind as you crossed the door, it was a cross of crosses, but it was a flash back, a little morsel of nostalgia in the distant past, painful yet somehow liberating. Success, you did get past the door and the cat successfully, no? Feng Shui has kept your mojo right, defended you from the builder’s oversight, the mason’s drunkenness, the painter’s laziness, the carpenter’s lack of creativity…you are here now.
The cat followed me to this other room, and now we are both standing stupidly, gazing at nothing, wondering what we came here to do in the first place. I might as well kick it!
Last modified: February 3, 2020
