Cleanliness
Two days before the trip I was looking for some letters my mother had written to me over 15 years before. I can't remember why, I just wanted them. (Objects are not just objects, clearly, and when I can't locate them, I get panicky. I begin to feel unprotected, unsafe, precariously "out there." My favourite objects keep the tent of my "here" on the ground, when the winds are high).
When I couldn't trace them down in the usual places, I started looking in the unusual ones, completely abandoning packing half-way through the socks and the underwear. It became essential that I find them. After the unusual places, I turned to the impossible ones -- little perfume bottles, small cream containers, slim opera purses: all the objects that belonged to my mother, which I collected and took with me when our old apartment was being sold, and which are now sitting on a shelf in my bedroom.
By now, this had ceased to be the search for the letters, and had seamlessly transformed into that old search which I compulsively undertake from time to time, the never-ending search, the search for my mother. I opened a tiny elegant black purse (for what occasion was it bought...?) and saw inside: a long plastic red comb with dense teeth, three gray eyeliners, a bunch of elastics for the hair of various sizes and colours, a handful of hair pins. I took them out one by one and looked at them carefully (not for the first time, not with surprise -- this is a well-rehearsed routine, a well-known inventory). Not a single hair, anywhere.
(like that day when I was going through her shelves, deciding what to keep, and in one facial cream container spotted, by pure chance, an almost invisible eyelash, just a thin black line burried in the white expanse of the half-used cream, quiet like a well-kept secret, and tried --slightly perspiring from the level of precision required -- to isolate the eyelash and drop it into an empty envelope, and failed miserably, and lost it, somewhere, in the massiveness of the existing surrounding world, and it was gone, forever, as if it had grown ashamed of itself)
How cleanly some people go, without a stain, a spot, or the smallest mess left behind. Just a simple, clean exit, no muddy footprints on the floor, no dust specks whirling in the wake...
When I couldn't trace them down in the usual places, I started looking in the unusual ones, completely abandoning packing half-way through the socks and the underwear. It became essential that I find them. After the unusual places, I turned to the impossible ones -- little perfume bottles, small cream containers, slim opera purses: all the objects that belonged to my mother, which I collected and took with me when our old apartment was being sold, and which are now sitting on a shelf in my bedroom.
By now, this had ceased to be the search for the letters, and had seamlessly transformed into that old search which I compulsively undertake from time to time, the never-ending search, the search for my mother. I opened a tiny elegant black purse (for what occasion was it bought...?) and saw inside: a long plastic red comb with dense teeth, three gray eyeliners, a bunch of elastics for the hair of various sizes and colours, a handful of hair pins. I took them out one by one and looked at them carefully (not for the first time, not with surprise -- this is a well-rehearsed routine, a well-known inventory). Not a single hair, anywhere.
(like that day when I was going through her shelves, deciding what to keep, and in one facial cream container spotted, by pure chance, an almost invisible eyelash, just a thin black line burried in the white expanse of the half-used cream, quiet like a well-kept secret, and tried --slightly perspiring from the level of precision required -- to isolate the eyelash and drop it into an empty envelope, and failed miserably, and lost it, somewhere, in the massiveness of the existing surrounding world, and it was gone, forever, as if it had grown ashamed of itself)
How cleanly some people go, without a stain, a spot, or the smallest mess left behind. Just a simple, clean exit, no muddy footprints on the floor, no dust specks whirling in the wake...
posted by Tijana | 11:20 PM
2 Comments:
I am taking a loog again... You know how I work on these.
I was really taken away by this small piece.
It perfecvtly painted the picture in my mind, simply, yet emotionally complex and filling.
I was very very happy with this little entry. One of the best if not "The"
Hey, I like that you call it a "little" entry. That's exactly what I wanted it to be -- it was just a tiny moment (more precisely, no hair in the hair-clips), which linked up to another moment (the eyelash), both of which fell into one idea, suddenly very clear in my mind (different things we leave behind). When I break it down compositionally, it actually embodies my entire "approach" to writing in this blog... Maybe that's why you liked it :-).
Have you been writing on your end?
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