Tar
What form does it take, the room, when I wake up in this darkness, total, unreal and foreign? The music stopped, the screen faded and the tiny sparkle of green light on my old, outmoded speakers slowly receded. That is what must have happened, when the soft presence of the background light of the streetlamp died away. I am in the midst of a power cut, everything seems still and transfixed as the nothing I see somehow clings onto everything like moss. I am lying on my bed with outstretched limbs –how long have I been awake?- and all I can think about is what the view of the city would be like from an aeroplane; how the darkness would register the intertwining network of dots that form imagined lines like in a child’s game. How long have I been awake? I think I’m looking up at the ceiling I painted yellow so that if I ever start losing my sight it’ll be the last thing I will be able to distinguish. I think I’m looking up at the ceiling but I can’t be certain –how long have I been lying here?- so I lift my arms up, trying to touch the wall behind me, something concrete to make sure I’m not dreaming or hallucinating. As my fingers caress the cold surface I begin remembering everything up to last night; everything begins with my name; my face as I last saw it in a mirror, my room, my home, the home before that, the garden, the furniture, the soft transparent glow of embers dying out when at the age of seven I lay awake all night for the first time. Everything that is familiar and has happened to me explodes and in my panic I close my eyes and conjure up the connections between the blotted dots scattered like marbles in my head; how some fade and others light up, precariously timed like malfunctioned traffic lights of a city I have never visited and know nothing about. I can feel and hear my heart thumping and pumping more liquid into my bloodstream, and as the adrenaline and the fear increase, as the silence and the darkness become more present I can only think of one thing: light. I reach for the lighter, the tobacco pouch and the packet of filters on the nightstand; I roll quickly, as always, as I am used to, and the fear in my movements becomes even clearer. I put the cigarette in my mouth, light it and sit up against the wall that is now real.
I inhale and exhale slowly, once again becoming calm. Now, the events of the previous night –how long ago was it yesterday?- crop up; the streets, the people, the bars, the alcohol, the lights, the smell of bodies pressed close to one another mixed with some drug, some drink, a kaleidoscopic, intense, mobile and talkative cocktail of everything. I remember sitting outside, and the two-minute monologue a girl produced, a friend of a friend of an acquaintance, about the huge poster behind us and the degrading portrayal of women in ads and the media. She left stumbling and got lost in the crowd. How long have I been awake? Out of the shadows comes the creaking of a rusty hinge and the sound of footsteps on the stripped wooden flooring. So he is awake too. He goes to the kitchen, pours some water and opens a drawer. The sound of his footsteps becomes louder, more distinguishable as he walks closer and abruptly stops in front of my door knocking so softly, once. Had it not been for the immense silence I wouldn’t have realised, I wouldn’t have guessed.
‘I’m awake’ I whisper.
He comes in and I can vaguely recognise the silhouette of his body, elongated and unclear in the shadows that aren’t shadows but an almost complete absence of light. He is holding in his hands two cylindrical objects, and for a split second I imagine that this is not him but someone else, someone I really don’t know.
‘Have you got a light?’ he asks conspiratorially, and his whisper has the mark of the soothing touch of something familiar. Yet this is the first time I have heard him speak in months.
‘Yeah.’
He sits on the edge of the bed –How long has he been living next to me? -as I give him the lighter and produce a smile he can’t see. He leaves the glass on the floor and lights the candle in his left hand, gestures at once quick and assured. I imagine now that everything changes as the flickering dance of the tiny flame that seems to have come from nowhere hurts our eyes and destroys the dark, the silence, the stiff immovability that surrounded us and through which we breathed. With half-open eyes I look around to see if I am truly in my room, if everything is in the place I had left it in. I turn to him and see that on his mouth rests the thin, smooth white cone of a joint which he immediately lights using the candle. After this night I will call him the ‘Candle Bringer’ because unlike me he hates his name. He looks at me. His reasoning seems to be that since we are somehow trapped in a pre-electric limbo, we can at least get stoned and if not enjoy it then at least completely forget its existence. My agreement is swift when after a few puffs I trickle my hand across his face and onto his mouth, comfortably stealing the joint from him.
‘Do you know the time?’ I ask while holding my breath as long as I can.
‘Four-thirty.’
Four thirty but the birds haven’t started talking. It’s so early and so late, my muscles are slowly getting numb and I finally realise that we are both naked, as the candlelight makes the skin yellow and black and the sound of our breathing is the only thing I can hear. We are looking at each other, trying to find something in the way we look right now as the light separates and makes patterns we have never seen before. I run the back of my hand on his arm, his torso, his belly, his thighs; the myriad of times we have done this has never regressed into routine; we know nothing about our bodies, we never know exactly what to do and we never say anything. I lean forward, put my hands behind his face and start kissing him, always afraid that he will turn away and leave.
I don’t know the time. Years might have passed, so slow it seems, this half-sleep in the darkness. Years might have passed and we might be old, we might have forgotten what brought us here. And yet I know that tomorrow we won’t need candles; we’ll start the day with the natural light hidden between the clouds of spring. I lie next to him as he sleeps, and I think that this has happened before but will never happen again. I have happened before and will never happen again. The candle burns on the nightstand uninterrupted, like the dying embers of the fireplace, and once again I cannot sleep.
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