Here Now

Here Now

She feels restless today, and she can’t quite put her finger on it. Staring at the computer screen, she idly fumbles with some documents, and wonders why she can’t settle her mind. She gets this way from time to time, usually in the fall, and it strikes her as a bit typical that while the rest of the world talks about “spring fever” she gets hers as the leaves begin to die of frostbite. She is constantly, but dimly, aware that she lives with an inarticulated sense of being grey in a black and white world, polarized 180o from 99% of the rest of the population. She sighs and chuckles at the same time, turning to gaze out at the November wind whipping the high branches of the trees, their erratic motion mimicking the wild mix of emotions that churned beneath the surface of her outwardly placid smile.

In only a few minutes the younger of her two children would be home from school and the press of that reality makes her frustrated that she can’t seem to reign in her Bedouin thoughts. She feels oddly displaced, as though she is always standing outside herself looking in on a world where she is two-dimensional - a cartoon moving haltingly through comedic antics that look perfectly normal to the audience. Absentmindly she slips off her stool and wanders over to the cupboard to pour three-hour old tea into the half-filled cup of cold stuff she’s been nursing for at least that long. Doesn’t matter… she never really tastes anything either. Its all just part of the motions she follows on auto-pilot, never really connected with the little room where that missing one-third of the her whole dimension lies dormant in her mind.

In that room, she hides her secret lives. Bold streaming colours and a Mardi-gras tumult echo in her consciousness as a muffled jostling of moral conflicts. Sometimes she wishes she were anonymous, invisible, free. But she also longs for her two-dimensional comic strip world, in the protective way someone adopts a starving stray puppy. Soberly she acknowledges that she must always exist in the static that separates these two alien worlds.

Sipping the hot muck that passes for her tea, she realizes she hasn’t the faintest who she is. She sees herself only through the eyes of others, recognizing the wildly different reflections in their eyes. Each describes a person totally disconnected from the other. The only thread that hints at any connectivity is the same, cold blue gaze of her unchanging eyes that blink back from the many burred images.

“You are such a fool” she chides herself out loud. “You can’t even pick yourself out of a crowd.”

But the admonition strikes her funny and a smile spreads across her face like a blood stain across a white carpet. Suffocated by her own sardonic laughter, she wonders who she should have been. Again, it doesn’t matter. She’s here now and her real identity is less important than the one she must adopt for those who have been lured out on to the thin ice of her soul. They don’t know that they are the potential victims of her fractured apparition and they must always be protected from the sharper edges of the splinters. That they have each defined her in their own way, and slotted her into cubby-holes that make them feel secure, is what keeps the uneasy balance of her world in tact. She’s not so much a round peg jammed in to series of square holes as she is a shapeless, fluid gel that can mould to fit whatever irregular space into which she is melted.

Her numbness is jarred by the ringing phone, signifying that she has only minutes to discipline her unruly spirit. She picks up the receiver and buzzes her daughter through the security doors. Walking out into the hall, she reminds herself that it doesn’t matter, she’s HERE now. But as she drifts toward the elevator, she wonders where HERE is.