la douleur exquise
“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
”
Hunger brings the girl's feet to the cold floor. Her slippers are sometimes placed at the foot of the bed. Other times they are under the couch. Or in the washroom. Or tangled up in a blanket. Things are not always where she remembers them to be, and so the girl's feet are usually cold.
She would prepare the same thing each morning; mint tea, toast with butter, one egg (softly boiled) and a banana if one was ripe. A red sun rises and the moon is a sliver vein in the sky. There was an eclipse and the girl missed it. She'd been sleeping off the hangover of aloneness. The girl's heart was heavy, so she danced lightly in those cold bare feet to the piano music the neighbor let stream from the open windows. Everyone kept the windows drawn up tight against the cold. Buttons and zippers to a neckline, wooly socks to a thigh. Not the woman upstairs. She wore a gold silk kimono with an orange scarf under that long navy coat. Her eyeliner always sparkled. When she collected her mail from the foyer, her nails were painted pastel to match her toes, peeped out from little leather espadrilles. The girl was utterly entranced by this woman and would sit at the window and listen to her long, slender fingers stroke the piano keys. The woman's windows were decorated with linen curtains bearing embroidered roses. Fuscia, purple, and orange with small dark green thorns. She placed empty vases with feathers and dried plant fronds at the edge and hung a small bird feeder from one lip of the wooden beams. Her laundry was never strung up outside like the others; instead, she hung gold and white lights and wound them round and round the clothing lines. The girl imagined the woman had silk negligees the color of moonlight poured on water. She saw her waking up before the red sun to cook rolled oats at the stove. She would blend turmeric with ginger, honey, and oat milk and sip her latte slowly. She cut an apple into small chunks to sprinkle onto the oats with the coconut, flax seeds, almonds, and raisins. She'd sit at a wide white table as she ate and use purple and blue pens to write down her daily musings in a leather-bound notebook. She washed her hair in the morning, set it with a deep conditioning treatment, and let it dry with the day. Her hair was long, dark, and curly. As the sun arched in the sky, the woman sang her praise to the cycles with the songs of the piano. She played for nearly an hour and then went for a walk in the park in the waxing daylight.
The girl spent many long evenings imagining this woman's life into becoming until one day; there was no sound of the piano. The silence rang through the marble-staired hallways and the floors were colder than ever. The echo of silence spread from one, two, three, four days until it was one, two, three, four weeks. The moon's glare kept the girl up one cold evening, and when she went to her window to look up at its brazen face, she observed that the woman's windowsill was bare. Weeks became months, and the summer pronounced itself with the sticky figs the girl loved so much in the communal garden. The girl was sitting in the shared greenspace one afternoon, staring out into nothing, when a dark car parked in front of the building. A slim woman in white robes stepped from the car and procured a suitcase on wheels and a large wicker handbag. Her head was wrapped in a brilliant orange and gold scarf- it was something the girl recognized and the memory nudged at her heart.
It was the woman!
The girl leaped up and walked to the woman and the words were out of her mouth before she could reflect upon them.
Where have you been?
The woman's eyes were lined with dark rings. Her skin was paper-thin and sallow. But her mouth was soft. She smiled.
Did you miss me?
Yes, and the piano, said the girl.
Oh? Do you create music?
The girl blushed, realizing her rudeness.
No... I do not know how.
Come, I will teach you how to play, said the woman.
She handed the girl her suitcase, and the girl received it.
They walked up the stairwell together, their shoes echoing on the marble floor.
Photo source.
