Everyday drama must have pushed her to relinquish the control. The control was not helping in any way. She had been learning so much in so little time. Coping mostly. Loss of her mother, father shagging her childhood nanny and eventually forgetting to call his only daughter. They may have happened when she was a child, but the memories seemed imprinted on her mind even that day. Clear as sunshine. She had never been able to process them. Learnings which came at the time when there was nothing that tickled her nerves, excited her breaths. Even today she would smile all the time, laugh at the easiest jokes. She would accept the tedium of those jokes and yell,”They are so not funny”. But even then, her mouth would be stretched out, eyes cringed shut, and the stammering voice which would be ashamed of why her face was laughing so hard. She was the nerve of every party, every get-together. The energy of a cult would seem to pass through her. The crust never really tells how the core holds the whole thing together.
They had all been drinking. Champagne and Tequila. The drinks of choice. Too many rounds of confessions, a more sophsticated version of truth-dare where there would be truths alone while the only dare would be to forget these truths with the last haze gone. Adultery, blasphemy, sodomy, gluttony, but her confessions were a little different.
“I am ashamed…”, the crowd started to jeer,” it’s bad.” The crapulence of the occasion helped the voice to drown out. But there was one person intent on wanting to know the “bad”. “It’s okay, go on”. She would smile, jolt against the little ottoman she was bumming down on trying to stand. Hit at her glass, the droplets would jerk out and splatter the other guests in the littlest but she wouldn't forget to apologise for the little stunt she thought she was pulling. To stand back on her feet.
He held her by her wrist and seated her on the sofa in the corner, lucky for them, it was not occupied because of its location. The guests seemed to have a preference for the centre of the room under the Roman chandelier while the dead and worn could slide to the nooks and corners. And thus, a seclusion to the babbler.
Rubbing his cheeks with the icicle on the outside of her glass, she started to
take on a coquette. It was most certainly the look in his eyes who pushed the trifler out. She smiled hyperbolically without realising she was stepping into a 2 minute monologue. Her voice would be lost to the world in its ‘dare’ yet in the mare’s nest, she could just declutter her mind and cry a little at no expense.
“I want someone to tell me what to eat, what to read, what to wear. Someone to tell me it’s okay to calm down when I realize I overreacted, if it is okay to fight, if it is okay to hope, okay to love, who to love, what to hate, how to live, what to believe in. I just don’t know the answers to these questions. I am afraid of feeling too much or too little. I am scared of forgetting things. People. Caring. Not caring. I am tired of wallowing to the walls. I want someone to tell me this is fair, this is not fair, someone to tell me this will pass, or I am just stuck in a whirl and could be thrown out at any time, someone to tell me this is real, not real, because really, I don’t know where I stand. I need someone to tell me where to stand where to sit, where to go…”, and she unclenched her hands while staring at her glass. It seemed as if she wanted the glass to slid from her hands and the splinters make a gash through some part of her body they would hit. May be she can finally feel it.
He dropped her to the guest room and into a cozy bed-cover. She looked like an angel with light shining out the light in the room. And he left for his house.
But, she had finally found his trail to his house. She was going nowhere.
