An excerpt from “Tales from the Marble Room”

Randevous

The room was spacious and cold. She could see paintings on the walls but the vast space felt echoing and empty still.

She was dragging her feet on the marble floor, counting the distance between walls.

This was her quiet space and it kept changing; it used to be a lake shore. Then, as she grew older, this quiet space took the shape of a quiet beach, quiet but suffocating at times.

After the beach disappeared, she lived on the edge of a cliff for a while; she could see the canion and the sunset, the red skies and the amber light hitting against the canyon rocks. She was on a high ground but kept starring over the edge, into the dark abyss underneath.

When the canyon went away, she moved to this quiet and empty room. In the beginning, there were no objects, only a monochrome room. But as soon as she identified where she was, paintings started to appear on the walls: summer flowers, country roads, fruits, tree branches. Close ups of nature or vast landscapes in which you could get lost into. The paintings were monochrome as well but somehow it didn’t feel isolating. The ceiling was quite tall, about 5–6 meters in height and there were many chandeliers hanging from the tall vault.

She was dragging her feet in a hyper agitated state when she started to sense something shifting around the room.

The air got cooler and a breeze went through her long hair, giving her shivers down the spine.

She saw how a long, black leather sofa materialized herself right before her eyes, out of nothingness and smoke, being drawn from the depths of her needy mind and out into the perpetual urge to create something relevant and useful.

The sofa smelled nice, of freshly dyed leather. She stuck her nose closer to the material and she could sense something else too: a delicate, subtle perfume. It smelled like a hot humid sun, shining tirelessly against the parched wheat straws. It smelled like grains, like warehouses. It smelled like summer and grinding flour.

She could remember that smell from childhood. It was her’s and it was something that made her feel alive. She soaked into it, closed her eyes and recovered from memory the same sensations that went through her body when she was alone, biking her way between fields of ripened wheat: the freedom, the sensation she could achieve anything, her strength to create whatever she wanted, the complete control over herself, the trance-like experience of being one with the world around her.

This was a different self, a version immersed in the sensation of thrill and harmony she couldn’t experience somewhere else and it was in stark contrast to who she was among other human beings. In any interaction, the self emerging was exactly the self who was smelling this sofa, slightly paralyzed with fascination but scared of what it meant.

She was always alone, undivided by her emotions but in a permanent war with herself, in permanent struggle to compete for whichever emotion displayed itself in the front seat of her body, in the outside world.

She took a seat on the sofa and discovered it was soft and cozy. Almost warm.

The room felt less lonely, less empty. She could imagine finally having some company in this place, maybe have a conversation even. In the past, she almost drowned a few times, then she ran from one end of the beach to the other endlessly, trying to escape sharp traps placed under the sand. She burned the beach, tore it down, went higher and higher until she reached the canyon. In there, she admired the sun, admired the edge and even fell through a few times (or maybe just imagined). Anytime she would fell though, she always came back on the edge, like a continuous loop of falling and starting over, almost dying and resurrecting again.

Maybe in here it wouldn’t be a fight anymore and maybe she would enjoy it better. Maybe she would stop feeling so lonely finally.

As she thought about all this, she sensed the air getting cooler again and another breeze sending her shivers across her body. In front of her, out of thin air, thin smoke, thick smoke, dark smoke, heavy clouds and vibrating black walls she saw something turning and turning, gathering shape more, being born with a loud thunder and screeching music. It bore the soundtrack of her life, dark music, light music, sad music, cheerful music, aggressive music, lyrics and sounds altogether, synthesizers and guitars, screams and violins, beats and drums and looped beats and sirens singing from one ear to the other.

She saw him, a tall dark stranger. The clisee of her mind, the concrete actualization of her dreams, her hopes and her secret desires. He was beautiful, dark eyed, with his hair on the side. His chest was high, shoulders relaxed, tiny waist and wide back. Almost like an action movie hero, the perfect Hollywood commercial caricature.

His face was a different story; his eyes shined and she could read an intelligence beyond anything she ever met before. She didn’t know how to react, but she wasn’t afraid; she was intrigued.

- Who are you? she asked, but got no response, so she repeated the question.

Nothing.

She wanted to stand up and demand her space (this was her place after all). She wanted to kick him out, he looked strange in a place like this, he was too beautiful, too fascinating, made her feel too alive to allow him here.

Pointing her index finger to him and thinking she want to kick him out, he then spoke:

- No point in trying to kick me out of here, I’m y o u.

- What do you mean?

- You called me, you created me. Or I created you. Either way, we are one and the same. Don’t look so surprised, you crafted my look and my personality since you became self conscious, since you were a child.

He sounded like her. More acid though, more straight-forward. More relaxed, self-confident.