The Room

~3 min read

Note: Unfinished

It started with a tapioca pudding. That damn pudding. What else could it have been? But wait, let me go back.

It really began with an invitation. I had been stuck inside my room for awhile in an attempt to study. Perhaps two or three straight weeks went by where I did little but rise, shower, pump out a meagre assortment of pushups, toe touches (reaches), dips, then eat, and work at a small little desk. Come night time, I would eat, brush my teeth, masturbate, shower, and then immerse myself in mental loops of an anxious nature. I had done this before—several times in fact. It came and went cyclically, like the coming of the tides or the waxing and waning of the moon’s shadow. This period—which one could consider a conscious effort to improve oneself—was always reactionary to a longer period of lagging inaction, whereupon the burdens of life piled upon itself like snow until the slope could support itself no longer, and then all at once fell and suffocated me with its presence.

But this is not about that. Between my struggles my friend checked up on me as he often did. He arrived unannounced, let in by a roommate all too familiar with his presence.

“Knock knock”

“Yes?”

“Is this a bad time?”

“No no please, come in.”

He took a seat. “How have you been? I feel like it’s been forever”

“I’ve been busy”

“I can see that. Have you eaten?”

“I think so. I’m alright thank you.”

“I wanted to pass you an invite. It’s to a speed dating event. I know I know, but it looks fun! I think you’ll like it. Who knows? You might meet someone. The experience will be good for you, it’ll get you out the house, out of your comfort zone. A bit of discomfort is good for the body, it strengthens the soul. Anyways I gotta run, but promise me you’ll think about it. Mkay?”

I’d had a rough time in the past few weeks. Had that dry sensation that covers your hands, which pulls back the skin uncomfortably like shrink-wrap. When the cool ocean breeze must’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere, because all the time but especially when I slept the air sat languid and hot. I was a frog in a boiling pot, just waiting for it to heat up. Or maybe it already had?

The room was empty, prison like. There was that bed with its blue sheets and gray pillows, and a desk. There were no posters, no flags, no Christmas lights or record players or books or figurines. Out in the hallway, there was a bike with deflated tires doing little but leasing space against the closet door. There were plants now wispy like hay and brown too, dropping leaves like tears. I’d stare at them, sometimes give them a shake, and watch the leaves fall to the ground in a crinkly pile to be spread and rooted under the scuffle of footsteps. They were dying I thought. Not in the chronal sense that they had at one time been alive and soon would be dead. Yes, the plants had been green, lush even. I remembered buying them green, how I had such hopes they would grow huge! I would clip them I thought, and spread them from pot to pot and let these grow until the apartment were a jungle. But now there was unlikely to be a jungle. The plants were like a painting: evoking life but not life. Like Shakespeare, how Romeo and Juliet were alive and dead depending on what page you flipped to, and each following the other to teach you how things ought to happen in the archetypical sense. These plants were not dying, not in such a way they would at some point be dead, but in the sense that all things lived and all things would march along to the act of death.