The Move

I need to put a disclaimer in here. I am the author but not the character. There are points of similarity with my life but "The Move" is also fictionalized and parts are made up. It is necessarily more brutal than my life is for the purpose of drama. Since blogging is largely lifewriting, one does need to clarify when one moves into fiction. I am in crisis, yes, and am letting that be a diving board... but I am not writing in the confessional mode; rather this is the imagination of a life...

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THE MOVE

She stares uncomprehendingly at the Notice To End Tenancy, holds it in her hand like an entropic text. It is composed of financial hieroglyphics and it has a greater power than all of the magical texts in her library. Its final incantation is homelessness.

She sips coffee, looking at the light of the clouded sky, how silvery it is, and wonders what will become. She snaps a picture of a fading rose on the window sill, and transfers it to the computer where she draws fiery lines like fireflies leaving trails on the soft pink lips in the core. The stylus a burning ember, she sears the tips of the labyrinth of folds that the petals are while she scores them with light. Tracing the delicate trails with her lit sparkler, is there a path that she could perceive if she could only fathom it in the dying fragrance of the blossom? Perhaps this tracing is an oracle of prophetic signs on dusty, fading petals that can be read even as they are crumpling inwards, and dropping to the floor.

If you go deliberately into the uncertainty of the darkness will you find the light? Will you find answers to the direction that is hidden but already opening out? Or is there no direction but what is willfully asserted onto the crumpling inwards and emblazoned in the clouds of the morning sky like a scroll of truth?

Even as she flees she is being drawn into the molten core of what is dissolving. But then she's given to drama, especially after a sleepless night and the worry that encroaches her vision like the smudged glass of the window she looks out of.

She finishes her large mug of bitter, aromatic espresso coffee and takes it to the kitchen to rinse. There are no answers, only questions. This is the mantra.

The house is on the market. It has come to this, and she is moving, but does not know where she shall go. Her home is crumbling and she is losing her beloved abode. This brings a stream of thoughts on the protection of shells, exoskeletons, abodes. How is it to live without a shell of protection? Shall she live under the open sky emblazoned with the starlit lanterns of the Milky Way? What is a home, a house, a place to live? And how is that an expression of the architecture of our souls? These are the questions she begins with as she starts the arduous process of packing up her house.

Or has she already left, already fled into exile, already been broken by the isolation that strangers are accorded, and is trying to return?

Has the breaking apart of what is warm, enclosing, protective already happened, and was there a fleeing of the shards of that broken shell for a new place only to turn and re-seek them?

And where does the compass point now? How is she to read it when its heavy glass is fogged and the pointer spins uncontrollably? If there is no centre, how can the world revolve? Without a home, a grounding, what orbit does one spin in? Empty boxes pile up in all the rooms, some still flattened, some already made, waiting to be filled with the accumulation of hers and her children's lives.

How many lives does a cat have? How many times has she landed on her feet, and has she run out of chances?

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