“Grey is the hue of my soul veiled in cold numbness
Long gone are the callused fingers
Long dissipated has the heated passion
All that remains are vanquished pieces of me,
A cluttered desk, and a dust-laden typewriter…”
Several strands of light seep through the voids between the heavy curtains, evidencing a shoddy and painfully dilapidated apartment. Resting upon the desk, I sit like an old man awaiting my eventual end. My miserable keys look to me not with desperation but with latent despondence. They’ve succumbed. The empty sheets of pristine white paper clutter the rest of the desk, fluttering and being displaced every so often. The windows haven’t been opened in months, or for the lack of better judgement- more than half a year. Not too far from the desk lies what once was a bed, and on top of it, rests He. The one responsible for all the wretchedness.
Untended house plants, flies hovering around leftover food, and the ashtray brimming with burnt cigarette butts; all signify a causal chain to certain death. Death of an artist, or even more so– the death of THE art. A decaying plague is what this is, eating up the very essence of what constituted meaning for him. The absurdity lingers in the room ever so evidently, like a crushing force eradicating all the leeway for him to reform. Where this all leads to is not known, but little is known about my demise… For it all began with me.
What went utterly wrong in the series of uncontrollable mishaps isn’t the question, but the one saturation point he’d reached is what matters. Months have gone by, and all he has accomplished is successfully blaming the structure of this world within which this flawed society thrives. The initial catharsis of piling the blame onto something external is probably where it all started.
But when did he really cease performing his duties as a man? When was it that he couldn’t be bothered by the magic he’d created in his life with just ink and paper?
At the very end, it was the death of this magic. It was the death of the tingling in his fingers, the fascination and the dazzling glint in his eye…
“Curled and crushed are the sheets of white paper,
The hopes and dreams,
And I, lurking on to my will to live.
Far deep inside the oblivion have the words dissipated into,
So have the ideas and the drive
And so, my beloved, shall the likes of you…”
The sound of the spillage of the bottled ink catches me off guard as I garner what’s left of my consciousness. To my blatant surprise, there he stands, with his sombre eyes set upon the likes of me. His veiny arms reach for me, examining me first and then brushing away the dust off me.
“If a cluttered desk is a sign of an empty mind, of what then is an empty desk a sign...?”, or so he mumbles, as he clears the cluttered desk off the several sheets of paper and dried-out ink cartridges. He then picks me up carefully and places me in a clean cardboard box.
The sun seems to be at the brink of setting, leaving a much darker hue in the sky. I like how at the end, the sun merges with the horizon and recedes along the colour gradient, eventually fading out owing to the natural order.
“We had a good run, didn’t we?”, he whispers, as he tapes the box shut.