As the pen gets to the paper, the weight of notions continues to dissipate. Pen to paper is not a stored recollection but a point that connects to afterthoughts. Although the initial whim is no more, further writing perceives and tends to go on. Veylin drags the pen from across the table and points with the nib to the page placed in front. His limb together with his chest resting on the table, the side of his face planted on the desk. With a loose grip of his right hand, the pen floats, almost; although it touches the sheet.
The window shines bright upon him, laying there with his eyes closed, light spread across the surrounds, mind holding and blank. A knock on the door and a woman appears, hooking it open. In one hand she holds a tray, a cup and slices of toast. He hears the sound and the footsteps approaching, yet he adheres to the space. Gentle, but enough to intrude, she says;
“Veylin, the publisher called, asking about you.”
The same stance as before, but now he blinks and sees the clock above the door frame.
“If he calls again, just tell him I’m sick.”
She sets the tray onto the table and leaves. Closing the door on her way out, she hums lightly
“Please make sure to eat it.”
Same as before, his face undisturbed as though she is still in the room. Veylin gets up from the chair, looks outside the window. A garden around the sill, bordered by a wooden fence. An old man stands at the corner of the block, perhaps waiting to cross the road, waiting for the traffic to hold.
“His words and not mine. The man, old, not yet old enough
to stroll at his will, but stop, why?
Surrender, just rest a bit,
stranger to the sorrow, the misery,
graves scatter, marrow ripens,
a soul no more,
ashes.”
Holding the pen, Veylin writes a version drafted standing up. He wrote it, but it doesn’t feel like it,
self-estrangement without fully meaning to reveal himself. He thought he was writing a philosophy, this is what I think of you, the stranger completes the very idea Veylin put on the page.
The mirror hooked to the wall opposite the desk, the light through the window alters the image it holds.
That is why it haunts people. That is why it makes a story.
The thing that sees you most clearly is the thing that doesn’t know you at all.
Standing there he sees the stranger again, a mirror,
behind him yet, despite the appearance, nothing to gather of him; the only thing he sees is himself, he feels what he attaches to the body.
The mirror holds the image, the soul to be desired by looking, velyin know he wrote beacuse he needed to, he knows the feeling of to gaze into abyss and not quite belive it.
The mirror:
“ But what I think of you; is that you wrote this because you are afraid that even if someone looked at you clearly, it still wouldn’t make you real to yourself.”
velyin sits down on the table holding the pen, writing but not reading, the man in the window on his way, the food still there,
opaque clarity, the vanity sees
a hull bloodless, grasping
the scene, whether recognizable
the strangers I wrote about
they are me
imparted, forced
the ideas, conventions extracted
they are me
comprehended, so a dimension
of intellectual and secluded reverie exists
a difference, a complex arrogance
it could never be me
never like them