User:Liverfull/In the Morning
They were once made, of course, these wooden blinds. Once brand new. Wrapped daintily, probably, and bought as part of a bigger dream, by a young couple, maybe, who made a longish car journey to the outskirts of the city, to a warehouse housing various homewares. And the wooden blinds, so carefully placed in the boot of the car, and removed and carried up to this… I think it must be a flat, I’m not too sure yet, but… but the wooden blinds, with care still, are attached to the window, and she and he must’ve sat on the sofa, a sofa I’m aware of but have not looked at yet, for I know what’s lying there. But they sat on the sofa, drinking tea and eating into a packet of biscuits, and stared up at these wooden blinds, and what they felt in their stomachs beneath the sugary mush of tea mixed with biscuits, what they must have felt was… pleasure. Not pleasure - success.
They have lost their luster, these blinds, not completely, but a few summers have baked them dull. Even from where I’m lying I can see it, or maybe just guess it, that from the outside they are graying, like I am. They are tired, like I have been. They have been ignored, like everything else. I try again to think of the faces of the couple who bought these blinds, who owned this flat, for now I’m sure it’s a flat, but I can’t see their faces when I shut my eyes. In the darkness I try to construct what they looked like again and so drag together eyes and noses with no definition, hair that moves like a cloud on a changeable head. I make some composite of a man and a woman whose features bleed back into black.
I send my eyes back open, back onto the wooden blinds. My stomach sours for a moment, not from anything eaten - I don’t eat, I know that much. But lying on the floor is a… cream-colored carpet? I can see that now. And lying here on this carpet I can feel my stomach share the sourness with the rest of me, with my hand certainly. What have I done? it speaks. But it knows. It talks through the wooden blinds. Unspoken it calls to me to sit up, to walk around the flat, to uncover what it was, to uncover what happened here, to look at the sofa. I can’t. I won’t. Because I know, of course…
I have blood on my hands. I won’t look at them. I can feel the blood there, and there is a lot of blood. My fingers, the skin stretched, there must be much blood, I guess, and dry now, they curl over the cuff of my shirt. It’s wet still, the cuff. And I’m aware of my clothes and how they’re on me, lying on me all crumpled, everything else dry at least, but for the wet cuffs, the cuffs and my eyes… they seem to be crying. But not just yet, but… I feel like I should be. And the eyes are asking me to think about what happened last night, for it’s morning time and I’ve woken like this before, in another room. Other rooms.
The sourness turns, and images I can see of me as a shadow and having found my way into the room I shouldn’t be in, I sit watching television. Sometimes I make myself a cup of coffee, depending on the type of coffee that the family buy, and always I sit and wait. And it seems wrong to open the drawers for wardrobes, to enter bedrooms, even, seems disgusting and intrusive, definitely, and wrong too to steal that coffee, to use their electricity to watch whatever’s on, but I do. Why shouldn’t I? I sit, and I’ve sat often on sofas, and it is the most still I feel. With nothing on my mind the world is frozen and silent, and only the silent moving images of daytime television brightly hitting my eyes but not my mind. The mind is untouched still, yet turning, imperceptibly.
To sit in another person’s life, to sit surrounded by their things, a world that’s invisible to them now. A place grown dull and beneath normal, a room ignored as this room was before I sat here and made it something special. To sleep through life, to forget so easily the wonder and effort of how your life is pulled around you and how it stays. When all outside is sliding and crashing about, to forget with easy indifference the home that you made, the room that you made to keep you safe, to forget all of this?
How many times have I sat on other people’s sofas and waited to kill them? Many. A reckoning I’ll bring, a reckoning to the spoiled, to the forgetful. From the carpet I look up and see them on the sofa. They’re still. I can hear their souls wailing outside and calling me out of this room, out of this flat, back onto the streets. My rest is over. It’s morning time, and time to move on.