Rainy days and Mondays

I wake up around the first hour of Monday to the sound of wind and rain against the windows of my flat. The wind is very strong as it sends the heavy, beige curtains moving. I wait for the sound of thunder but doesn’t hear it. Instead I hear the wind whistling as it penetrates the sieve formed by the leaves of the mango tree in front of my apartment building. I feel the room becoming a tad colder. I embrace a pillow, and smell a phantom smell. My verandah would be strewn with dried leaves and broken twigs in the morning, I think. 

With some effort I go back to sleep.

I wake up again five hours later. Rising this time from bed, I look at my watch to check the time, before absent-mindedly stepping out my room. After pissing, I walk into the kitchen. Take the ground coffee from the refrigerator, pour a scoopful into the machine, and add enough water before pouring a cup of corn flakes unto a bowl. A spoon of raisin, followed by two swirls of non-fat milk. I put a teaspoon each of sugar and creamer into a mug then cut myself two slices of papaya. The coffee drips. I rub my eyes and face awake.

Moments later I am sitting on a bamboo chair in my verandah. My breakfast is on a lacquer tray, set on the hexagonal bamboo table. I try to find patterns on the leaves scattered on the floor. The sky is still a dull shade of gray, filled with fat clouds. The pavement on the street below is still moist. Business is at its usual briskness in the restaurant on the ground floor of my apartment building. Cars park along the sidewalk, out of which people and families emerge to have breakfast at this restaurant. Past breakfasts in similar restaurants come to mind momentarily.

I don’t need to water the plants this morning, I tell no one but myself. 

It is half-past ten and the sun has chosen to hide behind the dark clouds that festoon the sky. In the training room expectant faces look up at me. The effect is almost perplexing. I hope they do not sense the small moment when I got choked with the words I’m trying to say. One face in particular catches my eyes. High forehead, cropped hair, smiling eyes. The air is heavy with electricity. I am almost lost in the forest of single and multiple responses.

The computer offers no solace. It does not help me with my disguise. The screen leers at me like a cruel whore. There is an absence in my mail-box. A hollow space that makes the wind whistle as it passes through it on windy, rainy days. Kind of like your heart, a voice inside my head says, chuckling. I want to say no but my colleague might hear my objection and perceive it as weakness on my part. I have few disguises left. I want to hang on to them for as long as humanly possible, if you please.

For lunch I have bitter gourd omelet, with some brown rice. 

In the afternoon the sun makes a brief appearance. Enough to dry the pavement. I can see waves of heat rising from the ground. Or, think I can see these waves. It is easier to imagine this rather than the meaning of his smiles. Of course he will smile at you, the voice inside my head says, slightly irritated. After all, he’s a polite young man! Aren’t they all, I reply with alacrity. The boy turns to me, as if he’d heard the little argument between me and the voice inside my head. His eyes smile tentatively, not unlike the smile that I have tucked under my pillow at night for more than two years.

I decide to turn to more important pursuits.

The rain starts to fall the moment I unlock the door to my flat. Small favors. Cold evening breeze blowing through the open window in my living room. I watch some television before making dinner. Dried fish, fried crisp in little, with brown rice left-over from lunch. I slice a tomato but do not eat it. I make lemon juice and drink it in front of the television. The boy comes to mind. Another memory intrudes, more unwelcome than the latter.

Hours later I am in bed, reading a book while waiting for sleep to close my eyes. The book is about a friendship between a bullied boy and a 200-year-old vampire. Their tender moments touch me. I am almost un-mindful of the impending sense of doom that permeates the book’s sparse text. Have to be blind to ignore the signs that their relationship is doomed. Like you, the voice inside my head interjects. Laughter not unlike birds cackling. I imagine my hands turning into claws that tear the throat that produces this voice to bloody shreds. I imagine it gasping, before becoming quiet.

After reading thirty or so pages I am finally drowsy. I mark my place with a book mark, place the book on the other side of the bed, and I stretch my legs, yawning. As sleep closes in, a momentary flash opens my eyes. Inside this spark images of my life of late rush in: days and nights merging into each other, the automatic performance of tasks that mimic life and living, memories pushed at the back of the mind. Disguises, masks, affectations and the endless posturing. Rainy days, sunny days, intransigent Mondays and indifferent Saturdays. The abyss of my denial. Dark depths, moist with grief.

With some effort I go to sleep before Tuesday rolls in. 

from an untitled longer work

phnom penh, 2008

copyright Michael P. De Guzman

photo: liese, http://www.sxc.hu/