FirstLineFiction beta

from Contest #8

'I wouldn't do that if I were you,' she told me the first time we met.

 

That was her way to define the rules that I lived by.  Subtle, non-invasive, but ever-present.  At one point in my life I had fancied myself my own man.  I had lived a life that had brought me to where I thought I wanted to be.  The right girl, the right job, the right idea of life in general.  But her words cut through this self-deception like the dull razor I held in my hands cut through the poignantly sensitive outer layers of my skin.

 

Today, for the first time in years, I hadn’t woken up until the early afternoon.  I couldn’t get myself to wake up throughout the morning.  It wasn’t under any of the normal circumstances; I wasn’t tired, I wasn’t too comfortable, I wasn’t having a good dream.  Every time I began to wake up I was met with an overwhelming feeling that everything I had been hoping for was now impossible.  The one thing I had wanted for so long was impossible to gain, and I felt like I had lost everything.  So I had kept my eyes closed for as long as possible, and I had not woken up.

 

But now I was standing in front of myself, with her in the background, going through the motions of preparing for a day in which I expected nothing.  She came up behind me, slowly, smiling, and ran her hand across my face.  Her words were always sharp but distant, direct as an Italian stiletto dagger in her mind but far off and abstract in my thoughts.

 

Boy, I love you, but you really need to shave.

 

I did not look up from the deep-white sink.  I could tell by her voice that one of those things wasn’t true.  I could easily look up into the mirror, glance at either one of our faces, and tell which part was the lie.  But I didn’t.  I didn’t want to know.  I had already faced a sort of heartache in waking up, and I wasn’t prepared to face another. Not yet.  Maybe never,  but not now.  So I didn’t look up at the mirror.  And, like the several days before, I didn’t shave, either.

 

I walked through the day in the fog of a person who has just woken up too quickly from a dream.  Something happened while they were sleeping and they awoke in a panic, jumping up in bed and scanning the room for what around them could have possibly produced such a noise, their haste and fear not allowing their brain to make the transition from unconscious mind to real time.  Everything is different now, the familiar objects of their room had become suddenly unfamiliar and threatening.  This is the place that you’ve spent unknown amounts of time, the place you knew so well before you fell asleep, and now you know nothing of it.  I walked through the streets staring blankly at the restaurant who’s manicotti I loved but I had never eaten, watched the dryers spin in the laundromat that smelled of strong perfume inside, but in which I had never stepped foot.  The whole world changed around me in a current of sweeping waves that were almost visible to me.  I could see the remnants of shaking water where one of these waves had just passed.  The colors on the signs and lights were exactly what I expected them to be, but I had never seen them before.  And I somehow understood it all.  I normally panic at the loss of reason, especially at such a level as that day.  But it all made sense.  I had lost something that had mattered so much that I could look at the same world I had seen for over two decades and see it for the first time, while everyone else just walked on by with the same eyes they had been born with.

 

In the mirror she had smiled.  I’ll never forget the way she smiled.  It wasn’t the smile itself, it was the tiny details in the scarlet lips that reminded me of when they formed a different pose, a smile that meant something to both me and her.  It was hard to tell in the fog soaking the air of my mind whether that smile was truly remembered as it was or was lost to the rift of consciousness and space. 

 

I sat down on a bench facing the busy road.  I stared in an apathetic daze at my surroundings; the sky seemed to cast a grim gray shadow over the world from a deep blue canvas.  I looked at the other benches around me, realizing that this was the only bench facing the road; the others all faced the buildings.  The esoteric value of a bench like this wasn’t lost on me, even in the fog, and for the first time all day I smiled.  My lips performed the required operation without skill or pleasure; they hastily did their job and stayed only as long as they needed to.  The smile faded, not gracefully like a well-worn, genuine smile, but abruptly like the absurd physical reaction of a man who was spending his first day in the world; the same smile that had inspired those dogmatic first words.

 

back to Contest #8