Puzzle
This is a short piece I wrote over summer, also on the theme of puzzles. I thought I’d already posted it. Apparently I hadn’t.
Puzzle
It was a handful of weeks into the summer break. Already _ had become apathetic. Joblessness was perhaps his problem, or maybe only a part of it. Without somewhere to go, something to get up for, he had become, over the recurrent days, acutely aware of the myriad minute sensations that pervade everyday lives. No longer was anything just that which it had once been. No longer was paint around a light switch just paint around a light switch, or a calender unchanged since February just a calender. Now everything was a part of some grandiose puzzle, a puzzle so complex and incongruous that even its final objective was unknown, let alone the steps to its solution.
Perhaps it was up to people like _, the writers, to put at least a few of these pieces together, and make at least a little sense to give the rest a frame to work to. But how could he when he couldn’t even lay down his own path, could barely finish a chapter or even a page, and had written nothing in days? As already stated, he was jobless, and in those hazy, apathetic days, where clouds and sun blanketed and smothered the lazy ground below, he could not enthuse himself to even consider where to begin.
Stood now in his garden he watched a distant tree. It stood hugely erect, pointing straight upwards, perfectly right-angled as it shunned the ground. It had always stood there, an overbearing, omniscient benevolent presence. In the lazy underwater dancing of its green-gold-silver leaves it radiated a certain calmness that almost amounted to wise vacant optimism, even when it stood naked in winter. Somehow the tree, that wise-vacant-optimistic tree, was always illuminated, either because it had sought and earned the sun, or because the sun had been there before it and spurred it upwards. _ was illuminated too, because he had sought the sun, the last strip of it left in his garden. This strip of sunlight ran the length of the grass in a band less than a meter wide, flanked on either side by the straight-cut shadow of the house and the more organic unevenness of a second tree’s shadow. This second tree stood behind _.
Funny, he thought, how man sought to control the sun, despite its immensity, and its distance. Yet here on Earth all light was filtered, perhaps not so obviously at midday, but at times likes these, in the evening, when it trickles down, running through cracks between houses and trees (for trees, even if not planted by a man, were allowed to grow, were pruned when not chopped down, by man). _ was reminded too of venetian blinds, like the one in the bathroom, that cut the sunlight into long frozen slabs. Of course, they were not really frozen; looking closely one could see little mites of dust floating sluggishly in all directions, as if through gently agitated oil.
He turned away from the tree, moved out of the sunlight. A companion, a girl, might improve matters, might stir him from this apathy. But would he find someone to connect with him, to spur him on and stand behind him with a warm and reassuring hand on his shoulder? More likely he would be less inclined to write. Rather he would take her to his bed and feel cotton and skin under his fingertips. He would delight in that sensation, the minute ribs of the interweaved cotton against the tiny ridges of his fingerprints. Then, naked, he would kiss the little bumps of her spine, starting at the nape of her neck and working down past her shoulders, marveling on the slow downward journey at how her shoulder blades stuck out unevenly as she rested on one and stretched out the other. It would remind him perhaps of a cliff, of a sheer mountain face, miniature in its scale but vast and infinite in its detail.
This was, in a way, a dream of his, and this dream almost had a name. Almost but not quite. The name he gave it, __, was little more than a placeholder; a potential future to keep the past at bay. It only worked some of the time, however. It was too vague and disparate, like the puzzle-pieces around him, to be an entirely effective safeguard against his memory, his past desires, for which he simultaneously held an aversion to their repetition and a sadness for their passing.
A girl lived on a certain road he had passed yesterday while cycling along the pavement, he remembered. The road on which she lived was lined with trees, all in a neat line parallel to the ruler-straight edge of the curb-stones. It was one of those unchanging roads in which the gutters were permanently lined with the remnants of variously decomposed leaves, forming a kind of dull sludge in the winter, that degraded to a fine dust in the summer and was topped up again each autumn when the timeless trees shed their dark oak-leaves. Perhaps the girl had watched this process year-in-year-out from her white-paint-lined bedroom window, or perhaps it had never interested her. It did not matter now, because she, like the leaves, was a remnant of summers past, of the days before apathy had set in, the days when the summer seemed closer and more natural.
What had changed since those days, those days of optimism and desire? Those days should have been like the trees; timeless, permanent. Then again, the trees were immobile, static. If the days had moved slowly but noticeably, like the oil-sluggish dust mites in the frozen slabs of sunlight, perhaps that would have been better. Perhaps. Perhaps that was what had happened, and the pace was too slow. Nothing had really changed, only the slow, natural decay of things and the artificial filtration of sunlight. Some people had moved on, yes. Some people had got jobs, yes. But they were still the same people.
_ went inside, shoeless socked feet padding through the green-dark grass. Each step sent soft benevolent sensation through his body as beneath his soles hundreds of tongue-shaped blades were momentarily flattened against the earth. Reaching the back door, _ felt the end of another recurrent day drawing to an ignominious, predictable end. It was a handful of weeks into the summer break and more than a handful until its end. The thought, or perhaps several others, instilled within him an apathy born of complacency born of slight oil-sluggish changes and a vague sense of loss. Maybe he would write about it, try and pull together the disparate ideas, push a few pieces together. Then again, maybe he would stand at the kitchen window, the kettle boiling before him as he stared at the lazy underwater dancing of the green-gold-silver leaves on that magnificent tree, leaving the puzzle unsolved for another day.
Tags: angsty, boredom, Fiction, jigsaw, laziness, puzzle, unnamed characters
