Pink kolmteist
A knife has sliced that blue dome and I watch the rift slowly heal.
Were I Shambal, which greatfully I am not, I’d sit in a bare room thinking. I’ve just started writing and I’ve already lied. The room is not completely bare. A low table sits off-center. A rumpled, stained, blue-white blanket is draped over one corner, splaying also about the floor. A dirty cushin or two or three lie about. Perhaps more are under the blanket.
I’ve always been amazed at the lengths he goes to to prove his asceticism. One would think that such a lifestyle properly taken on denied the possibilty of proving any appearances. The dim fire of ego still burns, I suppose.
The letter I received yesterday morning contained the quoted words above. I call it a letter because part of me pines for correspondence. I am definitely no ascetic. It was a mere note. Two scribbled lines. The break was between blue and dome. It was no surprise. Shambal has been babbling on for weeks about the sky cracking and letting in what he calls fumes from what he calls the mantle. I’m not convinced at his ravings. No one is.
Dopamine, my sphincter - the lengths you’ll go to rationalize your actions would amaze even Natascha.
Before I lay down on my wine-soiled mattress last night and closed my eyes and drifted into coma state, I wrote my reply to Shambal. I try to keep my replies cryptic. Sometimes I feel like it is a sort of competition. Who can out-crypt whom?
If you are wondering who Natascha is, I’ll elaborate for a few lines before my morning refill. I always felt deep pain and emptiness when I was around her. The fact that I’ve not had my refill yet may interfere with proper memories, however. Still, there was something. A gap, maybe? No, not in my memory, but in my feelings when she was around. When she was absent - as she always is now - I drew childish cartoons on one of my four tables with the chalks I kept around. I had blue, orange, green and white. They are used up now. Maybe that is why she is never around anymore.
All of my tabletops are bare of any covering. Sure, tins and metallic cups litter them, but most of the bark is exposed. All that remains of my cartoons are strange smudges in combinations of those colours. Now I cannot even concretely recall what it was I drew. Surely they had something to do with her. Maybe a caricature of her face or of one of her breasts or the discolouration on the inside of her right thigh. I fear she will be completely gone when even the smudges become a wash of nothingness.
My memory is poor enough as it is.
The simmering broth in the cauldron exhales the wafting fragrance of your woman’s bones and hide.
I sent my note off by courier in the morning yesterday.
This reply came almost immediately. I say immediately because time becomes transparent when memory has nothing to register. When spots or windows of this sort occur, I just assume nothing of interest happened.
