When I wheeled
When I wheeled around to look back into the apartment everything was closer in to me. The ceiling was enormous and small in a way that made the walls need to taper inward to hold it in place but its surface was so upon my face that I couldnt see its edges. The room had more corners and each corner had things spilling out of it, pieces of furniture backed into each other and stacked, beige foam, bits of glass beads, crevices jammed with mail circulars and unpostmarked envelopes, totemistic trinkets and fetishes from dried out gutters and medians, everything appearing in mirrored groups with other corners and vertices of shadow. The room encircled me and as I found a bit of wall to focus on while the time passed a jumble of old papers would slide into the space. It was one space facing inward. I turned off the lights that wer wedged into the bedecked shell of the room leaving on the tall gooseneck lamp that illuminated the chair that faced into the room with a low table before it. Both sat alone. Everything was gone again, not into the shadow, but into nothing. The beige light leaned in from the open door and I sat down in the chair. She shut the door behind her. She was colourless in the shade.
She was wet. The rain blotting out the colour of her hair and skin and falling long and still blotted out the sun and inversely riled the orange sky. No one really needs anyone. She looks at me tentatively, into a shop window or down a long street that converges on itself, concealing things, and beyond me from the shadows through the light and back into the shadows. What do she and I become in all of this, together in a series of relatively small bound chambers, we have the night to play out. I could draw things out from her, origin stories, tableaux, schedules, habits. How do you survive without anything but your body. How do you survive without that, but everything else. I didnt need to know. I knew. If you were all of those other things, and they were forgotten, washed away in the high water, would you blame them for not swimming to the surface, or not sinking to the bottom in the right order. Her bare feet dry quickly on the carpet. I get out of my chair to get her a towel for her hair. The bathroom door is closed. The towels are in the hall, in a cupboard with half of the doors painted shut. She pats her scalp with a mauve towel and wraps it around the train of dim hair. She sits between a chest of drawers and a stack of boxes full of photographs and leans against a bare spot where the wall and floor meet. I put a mug of tea on the glass table and sit back in my chair. Things have order, they are ever fortuitous. I feel things stop inside me as they reach a point in time that their action fits into. She and I breathe and watch the steam between us respond. Ill fall apart. I cant see a moment where she is still. Each breath is full of enough abandon to swirl the whole apartment into a mutinous dump. I think of the conception of our parallel course. She wouldnt move there. She would be a shade, a figure beneath the paint. But she and I breathe, exchanging the hot and damp air, personal secrets.
