Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Unspoken Eulogy
They got the hands slightly wrong.
*****
When it comes to my time, I think I should prefer to be interred in the ground.
(...Please.)
*****
Too much noise.
That's what he thought as he stepped through the door and away from the madding crowd. There was a slight desperation about it all, the frenzied catching up, the pleasantries and pleasant smiles one smiles at long-lost relatives that one never really sees, or ever gets to know... and he needed to escape all that.
He felt the sun on his skin as he skulked around outside, pausing for a moment at the old metal-frame swing that he used to play on as a child, that they don't seem to make anymore. He put a foot up on it, before noticing the rust-eaten hinges and smiling ruefully to himself.
He wandered back indoors but shunned the crowd, pausing for a while to sit down in a chair and stare aimlessly outside, through the ornately grilled windows, remembering a time when he used to do precisely this, and hope, and pray, for something... anything... to come and rescue him from... everything bad. From the chains in his mind.
He walked through her ghost, standing frozen in time on the corner with the bougainvillas, somewhere in the distance of the rear-view mirror cheerfully waving farewell to her children as the dad's car left her rapidly shrinking from view.
He smelt her scent, a rich, heady odour of mingled old-woman perfumes, harsh on the senses at first... powerfully breath-stopping stuff, musk almost, which gradually grew on you as you learnt to breathe again.
He remembered her smile; a kind, increasingly vacant and becoming more puzzled as the years passed, but always genuinely pleased and... kind.
Someone he wished he had known better, when he had the chance.
He played the piano for a while; this time nobody to ask the mother what he was playing, or to smile vacantly and lie that it was very nice... an empty house, full of familiar people. A shell of the past, haunted by memory.
Goodbye.
*****
When it comes to my time, I think I should prefer to be interred in the ground.
(...Please.)
*****
Too much noise.
That's what he thought as he stepped through the door and away from the madding crowd. There was a slight desperation about it all, the frenzied catching up, the pleasantries and pleasant smiles one smiles at long-lost relatives that one never really sees, or ever gets to know... and he needed to escape all that.
He felt the sun on his skin as he skulked around outside, pausing for a moment at the old metal-frame swing that he used to play on as a child, that they don't seem to make anymore. He put a foot up on it, before noticing the rust-eaten hinges and smiling ruefully to himself.
He wandered back indoors but shunned the crowd, pausing for a while to sit down in a chair and stare aimlessly outside, through the ornately grilled windows, remembering a time when he used to do precisely this, and hope, and pray, for something... anything... to come and rescue him from... everything bad. From the chains in his mind.
He walked through her ghost, standing frozen in time on the corner with the bougainvillas, somewhere in the distance of the rear-view mirror cheerfully waving farewell to her children as the dad's car left her rapidly shrinking from view.
He smelt her scent, a rich, heady odour of mingled old-woman perfumes, harsh on the senses at first... powerfully breath-stopping stuff, musk almost, which gradually grew on you as you learnt to breathe again.
He remembered her smile; a kind, increasingly vacant and becoming more puzzled as the years passed, but always genuinely pleased and... kind.
Someone he wished he had known better, when he had the chance.
He played the piano for a while; this time nobody to ask the mother what he was playing, or to smile vacantly and lie that it was very nice... an empty house, full of familiar people. A shell of the past, haunted by memory.
Goodbye.
