There’s a small room. Cluttered like mine. White walls, red bedspread. Yesterday’s glass of water is on the bedside table, last night’s dinner dishes on the floor. The wardrobe doors are left open, photos are tacked up, the mirrors are spotty.
When he’s not there, she imagines him in it; watching her drink tea, and listen to her music, do her hair in the morning, smearing lipstick. She has imaginary conversations with him in her head. She isn’t able to predict his answers very well. She can really only dream up the best way to tell her stories, a way that will make her memorable to him. She imagines opening her door for him, hastily clearing a space on an ugly chair, gathering arms full of second-hand books and tights and unused diaries. She imagines him sprawling in the chair, not taking up as much physical space as he should. She tries to imagine his mental tally of the room’s shortcomings. His reaction to the books on her floor, his perusal of the things she gathers around her. She imagines him thinking; “no, not her. Not this one.”
The only place he really inhabits in her life is the space she clears for him, with apprehension. He may or may not sit in the cleared space. She tells herself this sternly by lamplight.
But then she whispers imaginary things to him when she turns the light off, again she has imaginary conversations with him in her head. She imagines his answers, strokes hair from his forehead, imagines what he’d look like underneath her sheets with his head on her pillow. Then she wakes up in a different place.
There is another small room that’s cluttered like hers. Yesterday’s glass of water on the bedside table. The wardrobe doors are open, there are little circles of paint peeled off the walls, where pictures have been tacked up then ripped down. The mirrors have spots. The bed is unmade, the books are not put back on the shelves. Here, the same imaginings take place, in an imaginary room after the light is turned off.
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