A Story Perhaps
I am writing a story, here it is
I live in a room full of unfinished projects. Every morning I wake up to the sun rising through my bedroom window. I used to be an inventor, you know. I invented an alarm clock that would wake someone up, but only if they had gotten a good night’s sleep. Sounds dumb, doesn’t it? Well, just think about it. What better incentive to actually have a decent sleep than missing work if you don’t. You need to go to work to get money, and you need money to pay rent, and eat, and do things you need to do to survive. There’s a type of sleep called REM sleep, or rapid eye movement. If you wake up during REM sleep then you wake up feeling exhausted. So this alarm clock detects if you’re in REM sleep, and if you are it doesn’t go off. But the second you aren’t in REM sleep, assuming it’s passed the time you set it, the alarm goes off and you wake up.
Except, I guess I didn’t really invent it. I thought it up, and then I drew up some blue prints, but that’s only two thirds of invention. The last one is the most difficult: construction. I’m no good at that one. I can think just fine, and I can imagine the end result better than anyone I know, but when it comes to actually following through with the project, you’ve got the wrong guy. As it stands, this REM clock is laying on my bed stand in about a hundred different parts. It doesn’t even matter, really, the sun does just fine as an alarm clock. Who cares if I wake up in REM sleep or not? I’ll just have a coffee or a Red Bull and be fine. But this isn’t about my clock, really. This is about my room. Or, more specifically, the people who pass through my room.
I don’t get out very much anymore. Or, at all, actually. I haven’t gone outside since as long as I can remember. I mean, I remember being outside with my parents when I was a kid, but there’s the big, empty part of my memory between high school and when I turned thirty. There are always big, empty parts in our memories, and this is just another one. For instance, I don’t remember anything from when I was four, but I remember being three. I don’t remember these lost years ever happening, but I take my mother’s word that they happened. I’m a pretty trusting guy.
There are these people though. They are like candles, burning quietly in those missing parts of your life, specks of light that let you remember tiny bits of grade one. There is the blonde boy who used to be on the swings every day at recess. There is the lesbian girl with the multicoloured hair who used to fail every class in grade eight. There’s the guy at your first job after school who used to flick his cigarette about a hundred feet every time he was done with it. There are these strangers on the edge of my life about who you know nothing. Which, in a way, makes them more enchanting. These people become fictitious, in that you have only speculation on almost everything about them.
My doorbell rings and it’s almost eight in the morning. It’s Thursday and that means it’s the girl who brings my groceries every week. Four litres of milk, 12 eggs, one loaf of bread, a half litre of butter, so on and so on. I make my way to the door in a bathrobe the same colour as the sky outside my room and two worn slippers. I pick up my pipe from the table on the way to the door. I don’t smoke it, I just hold it. It makes me feel like an inventor, or an author. It makes me feel like an entrepreneur.
I open the door and there is my grocery girl with her dark green Shopper’s hat and her glasses from the early twenty-first century. That is what the kids are doing these days, I guess. Dressing like they are part of my generation. It makes me feel like she is a girl at the edge of my life back when I was a teenager, back when my head had more hair than it did sense. She chews gum and has headphones in her ears; white headphones. She is part of an iPod clique, like back when I was a kid. Except nowadays if you’re flying the wrong iPod you get shot, or stabbed, or run over.
This is exactly why I don’t leave my room.
I feel pretty bad for Emily. That is her name. I never once asked, she just has a nametag, so she volunteers her name every second she wears it. She knows my name only because I had to give it to her bosses when I ordered groceries. We have not once spoken to each other and I am in love with her.
She wordlessly hands me the bags of groceries and nods. I nod back. This is the extent of our communication. She smiles warmly and I turn to take the groceries inside.
“See you next week, Mr. Flynn.” she says to me. I stop in mid-turn as she walks away. She dances lightly down the street to the music in her headphones. I am briefly stunned.
I close the door and put the groceries on the counter. I got and sit down in a chair in my living room facing the reinforced bullet-proof glass picture window, forgetting about the groceries. That was the first time I have ever heard Emily say any words. What has changed between now and last Thursday? What made her speak to me? Nothing. The passage of time is the only thing that has occurred since our previous meeting. It’s so strange to think that nothing I have ever done has mattered, that all that changed anything was the subtle deepening of the wrinkles on my forehead, or the length of our acquaintance.
Outside my window there is a protest nearby. Some radical militant Christian organization is protesting for their right to bear arms or something like that. It’s a “Nuns For Guns” protest. This is exactly why I don’t go outside. I don’t need some pent up sister waving a revolver in my face.
The sun through the window feels warm on my face. It is bright and has risen above the low mountains around the city. The light looks golden on the wooden floor of my living room. It looks romantic and picturesque. I put my pipe in my mouth and feel romantic and picturesque. In the daylight I feel beautiful and sexy. It warms my legs and I feel the heat in my core.
I wear a succinct smile, so small but saying so much. The gentle curve of my thin lips screams inversely to its size that today I am in love with everything. I would like to dance down the street and lay on the sidewalk and bake in the sun. I would like the nuns for guns to come into my house and put down their signs and rest their chanting voices and to give each of them a hug and kiss them all until they do not think that they need guns. I would like to hold Emily’s hand in mine and fall asleep somewhere strange and comfortable.
My room is filled with hundreds of notebooks. I have built a castle of them and I write on the walls. I write poetry, and short stories. I write novels and blueprints. I paint and draw. Each of these small black leather books is filled with the beginnings and middles of everything I have tried. There are the seven chapters of my murder-mystery novella in which the victims are killed by freak accidents which look like murders. There is the beginning of the poem about the feelings of keeping secrets. There is the small sketch of the street I live on with no buildings on the right side and only one of the people outside casting something like a shadow.