Queen Of Crumpled Pages

It is five again. It is that time of the day when I lose myself in the dark pit whirling inside me. Yesterday, I could help myself. Before the golden rays of the setting sun started rushing inside the blue panels of our house, I could escape. But today, I couldn’t. My legs have failed my might and my arms have betrayed my brain.

On the mahogany table beside our bed is your red ink pot. I opened that small glass vial yesterday to suck out some blood for my starving Parker pen, but I didn’t. When I opened the lid, I could see a fragile skin of red ink on the mouth of the bottle due to the long years of negligence. Owing to its vulnerable appeal, I didn’t venture to break through and left the vial to be on its own. Inside that frail skin, is a different time: a time when you wrote, sang, ran, lived and breathed. And on the outside is this grim reality sans your poems, songs, love and life.

I have stopped my medication. The pink and orange pills no longer amuse me. I sincerely believe that I am better off without them. even though in a spirited moment of frenzy, I did pull out that old red book from the shelf, and tore out all the pages, something in me tells me that I can be ok without those tiny pills. Mother says they are dangerous, yet she forces me to take them. Every time she hands me that pink pill, I see on her face a dance of contradictory emotions. Yet, she gives them because she is scared. She is such a poor soul. Irrational too. She becomes too upset and terrified about the little things. These days my new hobbies are my latest obsessions. She constantly revolves around me with her two eyeballs trying to get into the orbits of my mind.

About my hobbies, I have developed some new ones, interesting ones indeed. One of them is pulling books out of racks and tearing out the pages to lay

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them on the coldness of our red oxide floor. Against the old gloss of the red floor, the pages, especially old and yellow, form a beautiful picture. In the midst of the tattered and crumpled papers, I place our upscale wooden stool from Pepperfry and seat myself on it like a queen of crumpled pages.

Then, from the height of the wooden stool, I stare down at the leaves of words at the feet of my wooden throne. Among the thousands of prints on the hundreds of pieces of paper, my eyes play hide-and-seek. At times, when I stare too long, my eyes get tired and they automatically close pushing me onto the floor. It hurts. Sometimes, mother sees, sometimes, she doesn’t. All the time she witnesses the fall of my round body, she rushes to my side anxious, and in her anxiety, I let myself sink in. I become mute and do not open my eyes or mouth for a while. Poor her, I tell myself, but I let her suffer. I do not understand why.

The other times, when there is nobody to witness my fall, I pick myself up with a sigh and climb onto the stool again to stand on it this time. From the altered height of my position on my throne, I then look down on the tiny pieces of paper pregnant with many words. Useless words. Fathoming the futility of all the words in the big round earth, my head slowly goes into limbo. Everything around me becomes mute then. the hands of the clock no longer tick. There is no wind to brush my hair. No honks of damn vehicles to irk my anger. Nothing but empty silence, ripped-up papers, a red floor and my eyes.

And in that split second, my goes mind goes backwards, and in front of my eyes, amongst the ripped papers on the cold red floor, I see you again, with your bruised body throbbing the same way it throbbed on that ill-fated day when that truck hit you scattering you and your books away.