It's raining outside. Quietly, she pours hot water from the shiny red kettle on top of her tea strainer. Honey Bee tea leaves peek out. Yellows hinting at some form of happiness. Caffeine though, is what she's really hoping for. The kettle doesn't pour right. After months, she still hasn't quite determined why a little bit of hot water always manages to splash on to the counter beside the cup. Usually it doesn't hit her.
She sinks into her chair as steam rises up from her bowl-mug. It's one of her favourites. Strong beliefs in her life: that coffee is a necessity and that hot drinks need to be held on to. She needs to wrap her hands around them. Something about the flavour, the comfort being absorbed into her skin. The kitchen table is wobbling again. Business cards she doesn't use anymore sit underneath one leg. Some must have slipped or shifted, because the left side is definitely falling when she puts her elbows in their usual spot. There might be a groove.
Cat jumps on to the table and her heart starts beating quickly. She laughs out loud at herself. Too many scary movies. Too much imagination in that head. Cat settles onto his normal spot in the very centre of the table, and she pets him, scratching his ears and moving down his body. The action relaxes her, and she breathes in through her nose, out through her mouth. The way she loves doing during the occasional yoga class, but otherwise forgets to incorporate into her everyday life. It takes too much energy to breathe. The rain is hitting the narrow balcony outside the sliding doors. She contemplates wandering out there, sitting on the railing. But one time she almost fell off when it was slippery and that memory - her heart pulsating like it was going to burst - stays in her mind like it's holding on for dear life. That terror repeats itself when she can't sleep, late at night.
She glances at the newspaper that lays on the ground. One hundred twenty thousand people in this city and the one who was deemed front-page worthy was her? A failure, it says, in big Helvetica type. A failure, indeed. She sighs, audibly and forcibly enough that Cat looks at her in disgust, before he begins to lick himself. Even the cat is offended by her. She pushes her chair back and it hits the rug, forcing her to grab the table so she doesn't fall. Cat is pulled by the movement and hisses, before jumping on to the counter then the window sill and laying down there. No sun, but no possibility of being disturbed. "Well fine," she says, and pushes the chair in a little too hard, upsetting more business cards, forcing the left side of the table a little further down. Then she turns and walks away.
The living room is a mess. The dreary curtains have holes chewed through them, the walls have long since been marked as scratching posts when Cat was just a kitten. The couch she found outside - one of her neighbours had it out there on the sidewalk to be taken away. She had brought it inside and put a cover on it. But something that smells like tuna floats every once in awhile from somewhere within it. No amount of Febreeze has been able to hide it - regardless of what the commercials show. The curtains are drawn, save for a sliver and the light stretches across the green-flecked carpet and up on to the Ikea coffee table. And there it is. There. The Book. Lit up right now like it's God's greatest gift to man. She scoffs. As if.
She kicks her heel against the coarse carpet and recoils at the dust that lifts off. The rain outside falls harder and she can hear it pounding on the pavement, the cars outside. She walks over and throws the curtains open. It's dark. Cloudy and blue and miserable. She closes the curtains, moves her hands in the opposite direction. The sliver remains. The apartment seems too small now, all of a sudden. It swallows the life within. This place that seemed so open and full of promise sixteen years ago. Cat was little and loved it. The open space was big enough to do workouts inside and then to lay research on the floor. The tiny little balcony was just big enough to stand on, look down at the world from.
"And now..." she says, her words melting into the peeling paint on the walls. All that work. All that time. All that energy and excitement. Gone. And all those arguments... those, even now, are the most painful to remember. That horrible, horrible evening, when he had come over. She'd been nervous, excited, anxious, freaking out at the thought of showing him this space. Would he like it? Would he approve? Would he start coming over and sit on the carpet and have his own drawer in her room? But he hadn't been happy. He'd walked in tentatively, as though his mind had already been made up from before the idea was conceived. And she could tell. She'd burnt the chicken parmesan. A bad omen. He'd played with it, silently. Looked disapprovingly at the table, with Cat's shape in the middle of it. Looked out at the balcony. And she'd been embarrassed. All of a sudden, this wide, open space seemed no bigger than a matchbox. And she shrunk, visibly, her energy gone. She faded into the background, the grey-specked counter top, those tacky white and black tiled floors. She became the music in the background - noise, nothing more - until finally she played his way out the door.
The next day, she'd picked up the couch. She'd bought a typewriter. She'd pushed Cat away from his usual spot and she'd typed, like there was no tomorrow.
"And all at once and then quite nothing at all. A space, a place for someone that means nothing to anyone...."
Philosophy flowed from her fingertips like it had been living there, begging for years to be let out. She was one with the universe. She understood why some people were upset. She realized how she could make people happy. Five hundred and twenty-seven pages later, she'd produced The Book. Full of wisdom for all ages - children and adults alike. She began having dreams at night where she would wake up, overcome by euphoria because she, single-handedly, had solved the world's problems.
...
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