My fingertips touch the keys, apprehensive and impatient. They hover and suddenly begin jabbing random keys frantically, producing a string of nonsense: the DNA of a character that is always lingering mysteriously in the shadows of a summer’s night, laughing somewhere beyond white sheets blowing in a spring breeze, and running from my outstretched fingers as I try to pin her down. All I want to ask is her name. I’ve been exploring her neighbourhood for months. I know the grainy texture of the wooden door to her apartment. I know every cobble that paves her cul-de-sac. I know where she buys her morning bread and how long the smell of her coffee lingers in the place where she sits each morning to breakfast. I know her daily route, her shadow allows me that much, and I know she is unhappy, the city’s sighs tells me as much. Her state is one which naturally shuns others. She will not allow me to come any closer, not until she trusts me. She leaves me clues about her past, like breadcrumbs, scattered throughout the city streets that she wanders by day. The city contains these bites of memory in the places which she occupies, and has occupied: the worn patch of stone on the porch where she sits each morning; the scratched lamp post which bears one of many notches that, as a newcomer, she made to trace her very first exploration of the city; the curvaceous script carved onto the Eastern Quarter’s archway. She teases me with these slow discoveries. And, in chasing her, I am playing detective to my self. She knows me better than I know her, pre-empting my thoughts and motions, leading me blindly into the next paragraph, stringing scene to scene and mapping my intentions for me, as I attempt to create something new from what has already been alive for years.
05 Jun 2008 18:36
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