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The White Room

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I’m trying not to think about it and at the same time I cannot stop myself. I close my eyes and the white room turns dark and I am there. She’ll lean across the table and touch my hand and draw it towards her lips. She’ll kiss my fingers and my wrist and then, without letting go, will stand and step around behind me, drawing my hand towards my right shoulder and she’ll bend down over me and her red hair will cover my eyes and in the dark cave where our faces meet our lips will touch, just once.

She’ll place her hands one on each shoulder, and with just the slightest pressure will raise me from my chair. She’ll turn me around so I am standing facing the door. I’ll look at the wood, the flaking paint, the rusting latch. She’ll step back into the shadows by the old larder, the floorboards creaking as she crosses the room. The dust is dancing in the bands of light. He’ll tap the table and nod at me with a smile, then he’ll raise the latch and I’ll blink as I gaze into the brilliant day outside.

I think I will feel the dust between my toes, the sparse blades of grass that scratch at my ankles as I walk towards the place we agreed on. I will see that everything is ready, just as I had asked. I’m sure that I won’t have been thinking about the feelings until now. I will just have been imagining myself as I will be, as if observed from a distance. I will just have imagined the way I will move and how my eyes will open and shut and how my hair will move in the faint breeze. But I suppose that now, at this point, I will begin to feel other things. I’ll probably remember that day a few years back at dance class, when a splinter from the floor came through my ballet shoe and how it made me gasp, and how the pale pink of the satin turned crimson. But I’ll know that it won’t be like that. Maybe that will be when I begin to understand. Or maybe I will just look over to the barn with half a roof beside which the things have been laid on the ground, waiting for us to come.
 
CUT


“Are you going up to her?”


“Maybe. Later.”


“She’s waiting. You know that, don’t you?”


“Yes.”


CUT


I’m waiting. For him. Or for her. And my eyes are shut but sometimes they open and I stare at the white walls and the white ceiling and the white sheets and I know that it won’t be long and I think of the blue of the sea and the red.


I want everything to be perfect. I want it to be just as I imagine it. But I can’t know until I’m there by the barn with half a roof. I wonder if I will want to be back paddling in the sea with my sister and my brother and if I will wish that I had never had this thought at all. But I have and I did get into his car and I did sit on the leather bench seat that was a faded red and I did let her touch me. I’m thinking of some old songs that I used to hear in the bar by the beach, the one with the pale yellow walls and the shining taps. They were songs from France I think. About growing up and boys and girls and the girl who sang them had such an honest voice and and I think about her sometimes, maybe all the time. Why am I thinking that? It’s such a long time ago. All the boys and all the girls of my age and here am I on this bed waiting and he’s coming soon and then we’ll go and we’ll be in the place with the stunted oaks that I am waiting for. And my friend the rose. And then I think again of my wrists and my ankles and I look at the marks on them and I’m happy.


CUT


“OK, I’ll go. Are you ready? Have you got everything?”


CUT
 
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I’m thinking of the house where I grew up. And the yard and the battered grill that we’d cook on in the summer and the shutters and the shower that I’d stand in and feel the water fall onto my face. It was the house I grew up in. I suppose I will remember it forever. I wonder what else I will remember. Probably the sea and the way it moved slowly around me. Around my ankles as I stood in the soft sand and my brother and sister played with their plastic toys and I wondered why he wasn’t with us anymore. I remember the door on the sidewalk, the one that didn’t shut properly unless you pushed it with your knee.
 
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....... A poem, punctuated by these throbbing musical sentences ...

"...I think of the blue of the sea and the red..."
"...until I’m there by the barn with half a roof..."
"... I did sit on the leather bench seat that was a faded red and I did let her touch me..."
"...then I think again of my wrists and my ankles and I look at the marks on them and I’m happy..."

... then I think of my wrists and my ankles and of this old barn with half of roof ...

The-Old-Barn_Kentucky_USA-small.jpg
​
...shivering of desire ...​
 
I’m thinking of myself as I step over the long wooden beam and slowly lower myself down onto it. I’m imagining the coldness of the smooth wood on my skin. How I lay my hands onto the sandy ground and look at him. How I raise my feet for the last time from the earth and carefully place them onto the beam, one over the other, just as we agreed. I think I look up to him again as he stands over me as if I am asking for his approval. Or maybe it’s her. I think she may be there with me now, just for these few moments as I prepare. Perhaps he is somewhere inside the barn or perhaps he is still in the old house. I close my eyes again and the sky turns into the sea and I can feel the cool of the wood and the heat of the sun on my body.


I’m remembering the boy who used to hang around outside our place in his sneakers and with his skateboard. He used to wait for me to come out on my way to the shops or on my way to class. He’d say ‘hi’ and then look embarrassed and then he’d try and say something more. One day he came to me and asked me if I’d go out with him to a movie or something. He said that, ‘or something’. I remember smiling at him. He said I was pretty and that he thought I was the prettiest girl he knew. I smiled at him again and I think I shrugged as I carried on and went to get the stuff mum had asked for from the shop. Washing powder and some other things. Nothing very important. It was a sunny day, maybe the sunniest, hottest day of the month. But it was almost the end of term and when term finished he moved away to somewhere back East and I never heard from him again. I wonder sometimes what would have happened if he’d stayed in town that summer.
 
I never did go with a boy. I guess I always wondered what it might have been like if he’d stayed and we’d spent the summer on the beach and going to the diner on the street next to mine. But he went away and I guess that’s why I met her instead. I was just paddling in the sea, letting the water ride up over my calves and letting my toes play in the damp sand and then she came along and said hello and I guess that’s how I met her. And I’ll always remember those afternoons in her room where the airco didn’t work and the old brown curtains that let through streams of light and telling each other to be quiet when her mother came back from work and holding our fingers to each other’s mouths and trying not to laugh and then sliding over each other and kissing like we didn’t know how to. But after the summer she was gone too and it was just me and my kid brother and my sister and her, because he had gone.
 
Lovely meandering of the mind here. You keep us tantalized - almost teasing - but with that dark undercurrent. I don't know I should be afraid, happy, sad, maybe some of each. Wonderful writing. :)
 
And now it doesn’t really matter I suppose. I’m thinking of how I’d walk along the street from the house where I lived and turning down the hill to the line of shops. I’d look up at the tangle of overhead wires for phones and power and I’d wonder who was at the end of each of those lines and what little stories were happening in their houses and whether they were happy or sad or lonely or lying with their lovers or shutting their ears to a crying child. As I walk along the row I pass people with smiling faces who skate by on roller-blades and people who are rushing along clutching brief-cases and people with bags of shopping and downcast looks and I wonder how many of these people are alive and how many are just the shades of the dead. And it doesn’t matter because they come and go and I will come and go and now I am sitting on the cold of the wooden beam and I can hear him in the barn with half a roof and the breeze flicks my hair over my eyes.
 
pkindenhaag said:
And now it doesn’t really matter I suppose. I’m thinking of how I’d walk along the street from the house where I lived and turning down the hill to the line of shops. I’d look up at the tangle of overhead wires for phones and power and I’d wonder who was at the end of each of those lines and what little stories were happening in their houses and whether they were happy or sad or lonely or lying with their lovers or shutting their ears to a crying child. As I walk along the row I pass people with smiling faces who skate by on roller-blades and people who are rushing along clutching brief-cases and people with bags of shopping and downcast looks and I wonder how many of these people are alive and how many are just the shades of the dead. And it doesn’t matter because they come and go and I will come and go and now I am sitting on the cold of the wooden beam and I can hear him in the barn with half a roof and the breeze flicks my hair over my eyes.
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Love the "wonderings" ... Don't we all do that?
 
The shadows have shifted across the room now and I feel the warmth of the sun as it falls on the white sheets that I’m lying on, my hands outstretched to the corners of the bed, one foot lying over the other. I think again of the splinter and my foot and I wonder how it will feel. I imagine I will hold my breath and even though I want to look I will close my eyes. I want to be still as it’s done, as still as the sea at the slack of the tide. I want to see the white of the sun and the blue and the red and the desert sand. There will be no other sound; just the one sound, ringing, rhythmic. And then a silence broken only by my breathing as I try to fathom the reality I’ve wanted for so long and that it is now irrevocably with me.

I’ll taste the salt of tears on my lips as he, or maybe it will be she, moves around me. Taking my arm so gently and placing my hand, palm upwards, on the cold of the wood. I wonder how she’ll kiss me as her body grazes over mine. Quietly, an open mouth and a splash of red as her softly-billowing hair eclipses the blue and the white.
 
I wonder though if that will be how it is. Or whether she will move down my body, her fingers stroking me over the rises and falls, until she reaches my feet, the one placed over the other. And whether then she will raise my knees, looking once into my eyes, and then take the things that have been laid on the ground anticipating the moment when she will begin.

I’m listening to the sound my breath makes and I’m sure when I think about it that she will take my arm first and that I will tilt my head and look to where my palm lies open on the cold wood as, with her two fingers, she feels for the place a thumb’s length from the heel of my hand where the fine bones part just enough. I will look at her as she crouches over my hand and pushes downwards, memorising the mark, and I will remain utterly still, waiting for her to begin. And the blue steel will hover in the white light and I will squeeze my lips together and hold myself so still and the sky will be spotted with red rain and I will be silent.
 
pkindenhaag said:
I wonder though if that will be how it is. Or whether she will move down my body, her fingers stroking me over the rises and falls, until she reaches my feet, the one placed over the other. And whether then she will raise my knees, looking once into my eyes, and then take the things that have been laid on the ground anticipating the moment when she will begin.

I’m listening to the sound my breath makes and I’m sure when I think about it that she will take my arm first and that I will tilt my head and look to where my palm lies open on the cold wood as, with her two fingers, she feels for the place a thumb’s length from the heel of my hand where the fine bones part just enough. I will look at her as she crouches over my hand and pushes downwards, memorising the mark, and I will remain utterly still, waiting for her to begin. And the blue steel will hover in the white light and I will squeeze my lips together and hold myself so still and the sky will be spotted with red rain and I will be silent.
Click to expand...

that last paragraph is so good .... bated, but still remarkably calm, anticipation ...
 
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