Joss Makepeace // scheherezade (thestoryweaver) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2010-09-29 01:02:00 |
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The clock is a metronome, a gracefully swinging conductor of a discordant symphony of two -- ticktock, time counted off with precise metric -- time is such a silly thing, she considers, when it bends and curves and dances like a shadow in the background for her, too easily forgotten and blurred like an opium dream. Something that can be picked up and set down again with the dreamy certainty it will be found, eventually. It makes her giddy to look at, too-quick-too-sharp, with little stabbing hands, scissors snipping click-closed when time sways and slugs itself about her, like waves against a storm-tossed boat. The clock sits against the mantle-piece, hunched there like a rounded gargoyle without a smile, reflected back in the mirror -- do two clocks mean more time, or less? Filtered through an hourglass, fewer grains of sand to slip-slide onward -- “Jocelyn.” Caught, trapped in place -- butterfly against the board (no flying allowed, not here) she is contrite. “Sorry.” Time is important for him: it falls into line like good little soldiers marching into oblivion with neat-shined-shoes and the tattoo of war-drums but he is not its commander. (There is a very little smile with her chin tucked to her chest; time does not behave for her, but she can still make it, sulkily, slippery like a spoilt and demanding thing, but she can make it). The weight of his looking is like chains, the feeling of a sprite wound about with ice-iron, brittle enough to snap. She could soar beyond his notepad and his pen, (if she wanted to) -- dance through the doorway -- there are multiple, this time. They look the same as the ordinary, boring one -- (that leads to the waiting room of forced quiet and blanketing hush, and a secretary who says ‘hem hem?’ each time she answers the phone in a glory of throat-clearing irritation) -- but a row of them like a labyrinth. The psychiatrist doesn’t seem to notice: he scratches his nose with a finger thin enough to be bone without flesh and taps the pad with mirthless solemnity. It began the session blank: now words crawl and creep across the page like ponderous insects. As she watches, they wriggle onward, across the carpet toward her. Joss blinks; they disappear. She tips her head back up, smiles at him encouragingly -- a very small and guilty smile. Her shoes are lined up neatly, like small sentinels beside the chair - she took them off when she arrived, he didn’t like that. Shoes on in this place -- a rule -- heavy like stones (drag you down and drown you). Behave, toe the line, do as you are told -- drown, go on, drown in a forced blank and empty nothingness, scrape out the inside of her head and wipe it dirtily across the page until there is nothing left (sometimes she wishes this were so). She curls her feet up, instead, tucks them beneath her and makes herself small and round within the armchair -- perhaps she could lose herself within the cushions and there would be no snakes, that yawn and show the world in the depths of their throats, no silent men who prowl her nights with blades like smiles -- but nor will there be nights of dancing that way, no gentle-eyed sultans who offer cakes that drip honey against her fingers and whose sweetness cannot be echoed in this world. She doesn’t know if she could live without them. If she would fold in on herself like a blank, used-up page, too many rubbings-out to exist. She pushes back her hair, it is tickling against her cheek in a thin breeze, soft-fingered like a kiss. Her head turns -- he talks more of ‘routine’ of ‘sleeping patterns’ of ‘regularity of medication’. How do you talk of sleep to one who knows not of its indigo depths, and the worlds lost in it? No more -- he will talk anyway, unaware a spiteful ink-blot of a kitten, with claws like knives pinching-totters along the back of his arm-chair, snaps fretfully against his earlobe. Joss turns her head deliberately, in search of the breeze -- but the window is locked, shut up tight to keep the secrets in. The window curtain still fans out like a whisper, the sky beyond is thick and purple, bruise-moody like a sulk (it was blue before, it was blue when she came in, it is probably blue now, she thinks, but it is so livid a purple -- she leans her chin against her hand and looks, closes her eyes, it is still purple) When they get like this, insistent, it is like fingers around her wrist to pull her on, to pull her in, under a tide she is never free from until it closes under her head and steals the breath from her -- won’t give it back until she promises -- the ways of fighting free (blink, wake up) don’t work. A gasp of air, surfacing, (blue? still purple) brief respite, why? “Yes, sir,” as he asks of taking medication, of neat white pills they know will banish them like sullen children (to the corner!) and leave her locked in and hazy, unreachable for hours. Sometimes she considers it. Lines them up like magic beans beside her tea-cup, counts them off, one-two-oblivion-quiet -- she would take them, if it were always the same. Always choking on the gold inside her throat. But it is not. Stories do not always curl themselves about her neck and squeeze like snakes, until they curl inside her breath and snatch her voice for themselves. They make her laugh, they tease and chatter and squawk like her own always menagerie, following her like laughing children hiding behind trees, an endless hide-and-seek (she will always be found). Sometimes they curve themselves about her, embrace with ardor-like warmth and a gentleness that feels like home and comfort and love. They are cruel, vindictive, sometimes they slip-slyly by and sususrrate their wantings against her ear before stab-quick-sharp to her heart and she is helpless, dangling and pierced on desires not her own whilst they are silent-watching by, like guards, like dogs. They give no mercy, no grace to pleas, they know nothing of that -- but they soothe; with great magnanimity, they show her splendours and splay out their sharp sweetnesses so bright and glorious, her heart is pain. They draw her in with softness like caresses, coil themselves about her until Joss no longer knows where she ends and the stories begin. She fights, kicking against them in sleep and awake, with pencil and paper, triumphant silence and a stopped-up mouth. It keeps them abated but they linger like carrion-crows, perched and waiting, malevolent. What would silence be like, she wonders, with her pencil flung down and the words spun out like threads across the pages and the stories locked up in labyrinths once again -- real silence, the kind that glasses her off and leaves her in the real world, untouchable? Sometimes she longs to spill it out, to pour out the nights of fractious tossing, her boat-prow sinking beneath unending, dreaming waves -- sometimes she thinks perhaps today, she will speak -- it is getting worse, not better. They tendril like smoke inside her head, blotting out her own thoughts until she loses minutes, hours, days to siren-like mist and worlds away from here. But can she? Silence -- so long since she has had it, she does not know its taste. Can the world hold anything colored, as brilliant, as bright, as the ones beyond this humdrum, greying one, where sleep is the ferry-master? Could she bear it, if it didn’t? Could she stand to lose them, her flock, her bane, her friends? The window is closed up tight like a cage with the bird caught firmly inside. The clock chimes: a peal like a song, like laughter, like an ending. He is speaking, she turns her head back, smiles brightly. “Until next week, then,” he says gravely, with the click of the cap of his pen. “Oh yes,” Joss says, and her smile is incandescent. “Next week.”. |