Sometimes I see shiny green glass
By Costmary
- 703 reads
You ask me how’s my life. I don’t have milk sisters or brothers to ask me. I sleep because of loneliness disease. I sleep alone in my bed resembling a temporary coffin, because it has a wooden caramel brown board plank. But it is not sweet and in my dreams there are children reels like “my Bonnie is over the Ocean”. No one visits me at tea hours in order to offer him green nut jam in small jam glass saucers, no one visits me at dinner to let me arrange the sets of cutlery upon their special glass supports. I was always fond of etiquette, paying attention to the order in which you sit or stand up as a lady or as a gentleman. We all stand up some way or another, and you see - one is more respected if he or she sits down. In an armchair, not in the common gutter. I bow in front of you, revered ladies and gentlemen! How are you doing? I have no one else to ask this, because no one is interested in my reverences.
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Even fairies stopped visiting me a long time ago. I adored the blue fairy from Pinocchio's story, because she took care of him with a teaspoon full of medicine and medicines aren’t sweet or good, like children cannot be wise and hags cannot be beautiful. The fairies with borrowed wings were my favorites, especially those from the kingdom of flowers and butterflies where Thumbelina finally arrived. I dreamed to have my own transparent wings among cherry flowers. But the truth does not interest nobody, that's what I've been told me a long time ago. The white cat from the fairy tale found a prince and, like any other charmed creature, seduced him and convinced him to cut off her head and she became again a princess because he was able to blindly believe in her. Men from fairy tales are sometimes the utmost of good will and fairness. But I wonder if she, the woman who was saved, had the strength to believe in her husband. Just remember the story of Psyche and all the other unfortunate women who did not obey their loved ones or happened to be curious to open forbidden doors in their castles. Everything in the name of the truth they wanted to find. The price they paid for unfaithfulness was the loss of love. Love itself is one of the great magician’s creations. What else could it be but the most innocent of all lies? And once again I am guilty of naked sincerity: can you tell me ladies and gentlemen what’s the use of truth? What can we do with it? Can we buy at least a roll of bread or a roll of toilet paper? If the inhabitants of the land of Oz would take off their colored glasses, they would see that leaves are not green in autumn and maybe they would fall ill. If love or hatred are divulged (because hatred is also a lie, alike love), then the tower of Babylon or other fortresses would crumble again. I still like to judge the world from the edge, neither from the inside, nor from the outside, I am still in love with Gulliver’s Travels and with don Quixote.
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I am asleep, this is what I do. I sleep because of the drug of solitude and from hunger. If I don’t have money I don’t eat and that’s why I have to sleep more, even from one night to another. I still have that book about etiquette and good manners that I found in my parents' pantry. I raise from my sleep with my hand clasped on the coffin-bed plank, because otherwise I hardly turn in my bed, having one leg amputated. Sometimes I don’t recognize it, my small amputated leg. If I weren’t so hunted by others, like any other lonely woman, I would have had now my whole leg. There are two expressions in my country: "the devil was lame" and "I caught god by the ankle". In which of them do you believe the most? Yes, I am cripple and I live alone with a homosexual neighbor who too lacks a leg, who listens to soprano music and has a young lover. Both of them are really polite gentlemen towards me. Why did I have to believe that homosexuals don’t exist when I was young? Look now, they exist, I say to myself, spotting the young one’s bags full of food. You lived your life, you ate your corn flour, I say bitterly to myself, like I heard in the past someone saying this to an old dying woman. Sparrows always dream about maize flour, they use to say.
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I think that no one will ever visit me. And no one ever visited me. And people like me don’t have a place among others at their tables with or without good manners. I am maybe a lady labeled a long time ago. My brain is almost inside the green glass jar. The label is in vain, in vain was that I didn’t know that the truth is not useful. I think that the book of elegant manners will make other and other victims, my ladies and gentlemen (if you are young enough, my gentlemen)…
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Comments
yep v dark, interesting and
yep v dark, interesting and stream of consciousness. the second line was intriguing 'I don’t have milk sisters or brothers to ask me.' enjoyed the tangents and oddities 'Sparrows always dream about maize flour' as it wound its way, always engaging, strangely alluring and fractious at times. lovely title too.
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