Jackie’s back. She asks me how I am and if I remember. She starts her sentence with two periods, followed by two smileys, and a lowercase letter. I look at the word remember again, surprised that she spelled it right and ended it with the correct punctuation.
She gives me two calls. Except I left my phone inside my room, and a part of me wonders if she will call again, and how I would break it to her that I am not Mark and I remember nothing about meeting her, or selling her “scarp.”
I begin to wonder about them both, Jackie and Mark–two characters who accidentally made a tiny appearance in my everyday life. Two strangers who I will never know, and have no interest to, save perhaps for the fact that I continue to become fascinated with this little saga of short, mistaken messages, if it will all end up as a trilogy.
I toss my phone back on the bed and shuffle to the kitchen to make coffee.
(Part 3)
Early morning. Uncaffeinated.
I am texted by an unknown number. Apparently my name is now Mark, I bought “scarp” from Jackie, and I am cute. She informs me that all her numbers are available. She asks me where I work. She spells a kiss with double Js. The message, short as it is, registers in my brain like a puzzle that the keypad spewed out after a night of binge drinking. I wonder if the sender used her forehead to type instead of her fingers.
I run to the kitchen, relieved to find that coffee is already brewing. Perhaps the caffeine would help me cope with these little intrusions from the outside world. I take the first sip, feeling a bit closer to finally becoming human for a time. But someone sends me a chat message with another stupid question, and I wonder which vortex this person’s common sense has been irredeemably sucked into.
I wander off into the veranda, which is perhaps the farthest I could get away from my tiny space, my office, my room. In the distance, I could hear old songs drifting from a radio. A thin sheet of white noise and bad signal breathes over the wind. Other sounds make it into my bubble of existence: Cars, motorcycles, people walking their dogs, dogs walking their humans, humans talking in a volume best suited for conversation across mountains. There is so much turbulent wakefulness around me that I feel as though the weekday has never left.
I envy our cats lazing about in the garage. Nothing excites them at the moment. They sprawl themselves over the ground with nary a care for the world. Later on, when my grandmother comes home from the grocery, I discover the scene of a recent murder: A small rat lies dead near our gate.
The world goes on without stopping.
The wind blows coolly from where I sit, as if winter is just about to begin in this strange part of the world that knows nothing about the snow. The closest we could get to experiencing snow is perhaps when we gaze at the clouds and feel their white, infinite softness fall ever so slowly… but not quite. Or maybe the ashes from a cigarette would suffice, their tiny crumbling forms–fire-stained murky snow–ferried gently away by the wind.
The world around me stirs with agonizing slowness. It is almost night. I can feel darkness beginning. The lights dim slowly. A part of me longs for summers lost, when we could walk home from school and feel the fingers of sunset touch the world and those beyond it. Now, I hardly go out. I am constantly plugged in a dream of monochrome. My body remains in place yet my mind wanders off into the landscapes of memory.
And I do not know if that is the best place to get lost in, especially when it’s this cold.