She had gone alone to the bar, simply to sit in the cool air and have a drink. It was late afternoon and the sun came through windows high on the wall above her and pooled in golden puddles on the lacquered wood under her wineglass. The bar was quiet and peaceful and she felt the first touch of the wine relaxing her spine. She slipped a shoe off one foot and rested her bare toes on the brass kick under her stool. The only other patron sat at the far end of the long counter and stared down into a glass of beer. She looked at herself in the mirror behind the bar, her reflected face pale and sickly in the gloom amongst the jumbled bottles of booze. I am lost she thinks to herself.
Penelope wove during the day and pulled apart her work at night to keep her suitors at bay, waiting, believing. Three steps forward, two steps back. The woman at the bar felt as if she had done quite the opposite; she had woven a world at night and ripped it to shreds by day. What she had done to others now was being done to her.
She had left a life behind, telling herself it wasn’t because of Ami, but she had always told herself whatever she needed to hear. She tried to start a new life from scratch, but she didn’t know the first thing about all the things one needs to live life properly and that the one main thing she wasn’t going to have was money. Ruin came easily to her, like a Tolstoy character, only there were no trains running nearby for her to throw herself under when Amin left her, which he did when she ran out of money. Lying behind her were only smoking ruins where she had scorched the earth as she ran to her downfall, into the shadow-arms of a man and fell right through his emptiness, like a stone falling to the bottom of a lake.
And now all who lived in her past are like ghosts living under a river and she can barely make out their faces. The elements of things she left behind haunt her every waking moment of her days, she hears voices like murmurs of water and she feels so huge with pain that she wants to fall into an endless, ageless sleep, a finality and a recognizing that she had locked herself out of the happy world, that she had always been adrift and apart and that only by dying could she ever tell all of them how sorry she was.
She had tried it before, but she had been too afraid of course. She was afraid of God, or Karma, or Allah, or Buddha, or a billion unanswered questions from a billion and more souls that had gone before and she was afraid that there would only be dark silence at the end and possibly no peace whatsoever. She could get trapped in a nether land of broken souls that terrorized the living. She might find herself in the middle of Jan van Eyck’s painting, the Last Judgment, upside down with a pitchfork in her head. She may have to go back and live the same life she just messed up, or come back as a spider. She studied and searched for answers, still somehow shocked that one could find ways to murder themselves on the internet.
Metaphysics suggested that she might, if she practiced hard enough, just float away from her body at will and she decided that yes, she would practice, but then take it one step further from those who warned about the silver string tying your soul back to earth ... she would look back and see her body lying there, see all the ugliness that she has created for herself, see all the ruin of a perfectly good life and a perfectly good chances thrown away and just cut the damn thing and float on off somewhere. Who needs a mother like me anyway?
