kagablog

Jennifer limps back to her hotel swimming pools. She calls in sick to work. The comforts of anonymity soothe the numbness inside. Her thoughts have petrified into fragile forms. Sometimes she would place too much pressure on one and a tiny section of her mind would crumble, tumbling backward into an abyss, like broken glass down a well. She turns slow somersaults in a universe of clean blue. Overexposures of white light dance across her legs and arms. Anita phones in tears and begs her to come over the following night. Jennifer replies monosyllabilically. Her apartment feels dark and empty to her. She finds herself driving to Anita on a sort of autopilot, as if there never was any other choice. They watch television on the couch and eat dark chocolate together. Anita falls asleep on her lap and some part of Jennifer forgives her without even thinking. And it is as though she has been placed under some enchantment, a spell which makes things foggy and forgettable. They didn’t talk at all about the Blue House, as she had expected them to. Instead Anita was sullen and morose the whole night, constantly offering her tea and staring heavily at the television. Jennifer awoke in her arms, staring at the doll-like sleeping face floating in the half-darkness before her. They were like refugees, she realized, constantly avoiding the subject of their war-torn country. A hard and utterly translucent substance had caked over reality, fixing Jennifer in its resin. She had become like the fly who lands on wet varnish, walks a step or two and then finds itself an inescapable part of its landscape. She sets there, in the plasticky wilderness, swimming length after length after length of cobalt coolness. She eats, walks and sleeps mechanically in this world. Once her nose didn’t bleed for a whole day and she found herself picking at her finger with a nail scissors. A vivid blush of relief occurred when she felt the beads of crimson break from her. She uses a razor the next day. Calm and tiny cuts. She is driving to the laundry when she sees X on the sidewalk. She almost crashes the car. The unexpected sight of him forces a crack in the shell which has formed around her. She slows and tails him like a heavy, morbid shark. He realizes that he is being shadowed after one or two meters and turns slowly in the sun. She pulls up beside him and rolls down her window, slouching heavily against the door. The sight of him makes her want to sleep. He tentatively approaches her. Her hair is wet and the area around her eyes is purplish. She seems older to him somehow. They stare at each other, lost in the bustle of offramps and power cables, dead neon signs and receding billboards. He climbs wordlessly into the car and they turn off into the mid-morning traffic.