CHAPTER ONE: WAITING FOR EDEN

The clouds were sitting overhead a moment earlier. I can see they’ve disappeared now when I look through the glass sliding doors. The sky has cleared up and the heat of the sun is pressing down on the top of this building. I can’t know for sure if it is really very hot outside or not. I haven’t left this room for a few days. Not in that lame I-can’t-cope-with-the-world way. No, not like that. I can cope with the world just fine. I can do my part, sweep the floor of my footsteps and help with the messy maintenance of others’ short-comings. Yes, I can do all that just fine.

I am inside more as a kind of experiment. I want to see what happens if I remain horizontal for a period of seven days. The bathroom of course is a problem, though I see these moments as brief and ultimately unimportant to recognise as a break in the lying down. I hurry through the motions and then move myself back into the horizontal position. It has been 3 days now and the thoughts have come to rest a little. The first day was very troublesome – having to overcome the endless rush of rationalisation. Why are you doing this? What are you doing it for? What purpose does it serve to run through these mad experiments? I watch them rise up in me like the bubbles of a formless gas, creeping through a crack in the bottom of the ocean floor, rising up from some deep place in the heart of the earth’s core, neither on a journey or not on a journey, merely rising because it is in its very nature to rise – as are these thoughts. I cannot change their nature, so I just let them come and eventually I get bored watching the endless rising of bubbles in the pool, and something happens in the foreground – that is what is happening today. I am sitting in a new place – new to me and yet it looks so old, so ancient in here.

I am sure I haven’t been here, though somehow I feel a familiarity with the walls, the shades, the hardwood floors. The windows are all closed up and it is dusty. Something smells funny, though I don’t mind the funniness of the smell. It is what it is. Is someone knocking at the door?

Hmmm… They keep knocking. Yes, that’s knocking isn’t it. Most certainly sounds like knocking. Now it sounds like calling out. Someone is calling out. They sound rather desperate, like they are afraid in some way. Afraid of what I cannot say, though the sound trembles in the air – it is muffled through the thick wooden door. The sound is what it feels like to hold a butterfly between your two hands in its last moments of life. The sound is the feeling of waiting for something without knowing what it is.

It could be familiar the sound of the voice, though I can’t seem to place it? Mother? No, her voice is thin and raspy – her voice reaches in its tone like a small and neat linen closet reaches into the hearts of domestic queens. Father’s voice is long and sad, like a bee without a queen, searching for some new home in all the wrong places. Inside a jar of honey and now stuck, legs losing grip. Yes, this voice sounds long and sad. Perhaps father has come to visit?

‘Eden. Open the door!’

The lines become a little clearer. The room of here regains shape. There is the window with all its pots and pains. There is the wall hanger with a Tibetan saying inscribed on it – a present from my sister when she returned from Nepal. There is the package that came in the post, unopened and heavy. Sitting on the coffee table. I must have waited six months for that to arrive and now it doesn’t even seem to matter whether I open it or not.

He keeps calling out. He is calling for me and I can’t bring myself to move. Perhaps it is something important, and yet it feels as though nothing shall move me. The care has slipped from my finger like a loveless wedding band.

This is really what the experiment is all about. If i am to abandon it now with the formation of curiosity then what would have been the point? The curiosity isn’t so great anyway. I don’t really care what he has to say. Even if he does sound so desperate. Yes, he sounds very distraught… what what what what what what… wot… what… what is a funny word…

My poor father – always the accepting loser. Unhappy in last place and yet without desire to change – such a beastly way to live. If it were me and it was something so very pressing I would knock down the door. I would kill someone if the tether of the rope were nigh. I would press the button that ends the world if I believed it would do good for some crucial cause. Though somewhere in the calmness of this room I know that no last ditch, last gasp, eleventh hour attempt fraught with the frenzy of wild desires will really change anything at all.