Preoccupied Rooms | restless and surreal
So the muse sat down with the cynic, and they began to talk.
So the muse sat down with the cynic, and they began to talk. At the opposite ends of a long, long table, smoothened and dented with all the different spillages and pen-marks and nail-marks and whatever else the previous jolly party had left over. The cynic looks at his watch, ruffles his hair and taps his pen on the table with a rhythmic dum-dum-dum-dum-dum. Seeing no change in the air, he murmured:
“You lost: I told you it would rain. ”
The muse pulls up a smile, fiddles with a loose thread off the cuff of his shirt.
“Oh yes? Are you going to wait until the storm passes again? That was our bet, wasn’t it? To see who have the courage to leave the room first?”
The cynic said nothing.
“But my dear friend, don’t you see? All the marks of our past quarrels and consolations are drawn up beneath our very hands in the broad light of…”
He wanted to say ‘day’, but then it struck the muse that there was no light in their room, if you could even call such a ‘room’. From whatever perspective, it was all windows or no windows at all. But then what are windows? Glass? Light? Or was it a word in the most literal meaning: a word just like a other words, made from letters and ink by other cynics and muses in rooms alike. It was a mystery, when a window came to be a window: who was it that distinguished worlds by a pane of glass?
At present, the muse and the cynic tried not to think too much of such things — it made an awful mess of a preoccupied situation. At this thought, they scooted closer, closer together: there they exchanged whispers of sorts. Hushed whispers, low whispers, trembling whispers. Yes, they concluded, it did not matter where they were, only that it rained. Yes, that was all.
But then if there were no lights, were there any windows at all? Windowless, windowless, windowless. The muse and the cynic held hands in that windowless darkness depthless. And after a while they seemed to forget who they were. The cynic mused about things he never thought to have ever existed before, and the muse did not muse at all.
And after a while, the cynic grinned, grinned a toothy grin, and asked:
“But who am I when you are not looking?”
And after a while, the muse solemnly replied:
“The eyes are useless when the mind is blind.”
So the muse sat down with the cynic, and neither made any move, move to leave the “room”.
After a while, the rain stopped, as all things ought to.
