A Wall Story

Walls have ears. Though I haven't had the chance to underpin that assertion, it is true. I do have ears and I listen to you and your spaces. I connect the spaces in this apartment that are home to quite a handful of people. 

Not far upstairs is a mother who has stayed home from work for her sick son in bed, he is hardly in pain. Whatever this is, this is not even close to bothering him, he sips at his liquid food and looks up nonchalantly to see his mother's disturbed face that refuses to leave, that resembles of glass, that might crackdown anytime with the anxiety inside. 

He decides whether or not to say maybe this was how he felt when Nemo was leaving them slowly when his fins got infected inside their aquarium tank. 

He decides not to since he knows it is a greater chance that he might be told to shut his mouth and eyes. 

He reckons how miserable and futile his world would be without his mother around. Oh, I don't suppose he can be even aware of the fact that human lives on our planet are timed. Carpe diem, kid.

If you sight farther down, you would notice the only lit window of the household this late. That's Ila. Sleep is her only escape. All the places she was supposed to be, she had been and had inevitably carried herself hulking on the inside. Ila knows she can always choose to fight, as she had. 

To choose to fight is elementary, but to battle for the choice demands the devil's finesse. 

This room is seemingly her only real home, for she had to perform a totally unexceptional person on the outside. Oscar deserving, trust me. A totally normal young woman. A person with an adequate appetite and a healthy sleep cycle. A person who is not fighting against ingesting the pills kept unseen under her bed. A person who her parents think is their daughter. What she's like, I get to see only after she gets home for the day. There are instances I wish I closed in onto her and made all this easy but I wouldn't want to mess up the lives of the nice people in the opposite bedroom. I hear her in the shower, on her bed, under the bed, on the floor, everywhere in her room. Many times, I let her lean on to me. She pointlessly brings her hand up to her mouth in attempt to fight the wild tide that hits her mercilessly, in vain. I am paralyzed as I watch her choke on her own fluids while she hopelessly pleads to quit. The wall clock is frozen and so is everything around, in this black hole of eternity.

A few doors away, it is a picture of enchantment. Two men make merry as they dance in unison to slow jazz music after a sweet occasion together. Whiffs of a sugary fragrance of lit candles have filled up their apartment and a half-eaten black forest lies in the face of the couch. They're attired in dashing dress shirts for the occasion and can't hold back from blushing. He and he settle for keeping shush and keep going as they wellspring on the other's charm. They tender-play with hands, stroking each other’s palms, tapping on each other’s wrists, twisting fingers together and squeezing each other’s hands, having a conversation that no one else can hear.

For them, barely a second has ticked.

In the middle of the hallway of the top floor, inside her bedroom, is fifteen-year-old Mahek, before her dressing table who is now stark naked, standing beside her stripped clothing. 

She appears frantic and is flipping out, gazing fixedly at the bizarre protrusions on her body. A lot doesn't make sense inside her head and she is unsure if the head is really what propels her in what she does every day with her life. 

The petrifying thoughts she had been having for a while that makes her wonder whether she might be lusting herself is a whole new concatenation of human emotions that she didn't even know they existed. The hair on her skin is falling off and slender strokes of silver stretch out their presence on various areas. The transform is in a way amusing and she just can't know what she is feeling euphoric about. Mahek can't be in the middle of the weirdest dream, everything feels so real and these new disturbances are intensely personal. Like to having been born again, like time itself halts the end of, and endorses the beginning of an era.

I can watch it inside out too. On the porch outside are two children, holding hands, sharing a tub of strawberry ice cream after their first date. Though they are not actually wearing any, I can tell of their rose-tinted glasses that gleam in their eyes. All around them is shimmering with life. Their smile isn't wearing off, not for at least the next few hours. I won't be surprised if it takes days. Their cheekbones are of the soft shade of their ice cream. Time ticks generously sweeter for the candy couple on the bench by the porch. You and I would agree, cannot never forget the firsts. 

While one of them has preciously billed the other at the top of their favourite things in the universe, the other has the prettiest wedding planned in their head. 

I have wisened up in this apartment with these people, they have schooled me real-life stuff, nothing in the universe is trickier than time. It is possible to not actually see a certain number of days or months or even years as worthy. It is equally possible to cherish a day, even an hour or a minute forever. We beings cannot question this anarchism.

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