Chapter Three

The bell rings incessantly, a distinct and piercing sound which reminds me of a child screaming. Horatio glances up at me, confusion and fear percolating his simple, animal mind. What is he thinking, I wonder? Does he sense that everything is no longer in place? Does he sense that my life is tumbling through a labyrinthine maze of confusion and choices and vacuous spaces? Djuna Barnes once wrote a book called  "Nightwood". She wrote about the instinctual choices of animals in an admiring and desiring way. To be truly free she wrote, you need to have no moral compass. No sense of obligation, no conscience, no obsession with the past that freezes your future.

I suppose I have just physically done that to Myles. I have fled, I have discarded my moral compass of obligation and consequence, and left them in that discarded waste can with my wallet, keys and phone. I have physically removed myself from his familiar, stale stench, from the feeling of his stubble on my shoulder, from the familiar sensation of his lip's against mine. Yet his face is stalking the shadows of my mind, the vision of his tired and confused face searching the room for me is dissipating through my borrowed sense of freedom.

He will miss me, but he will miss me like a tired, crumpled sofa misses a pillow. He will search for me in the rust of the pipes, in the rot of the wood, in the aching and spent morning's rays. He will search for me, but will he find me? Where am I to be found? Where should I go?

The bell continues to ring, mellowing now as it seeps back into the morning's horizon. Horatio returns his head to his paws, confused yet content as he lies beside me. All my choices have lead me up to this moment, the decision to love a man who could not love, the decision to stifle the boredom and sense of entrapment in my heart. The decision to leave all my mundane existence knew. The fragile balance of life's choices, the inescapable consequence of decisions hang before me.Whose story do I seek now? Do i return to the tired, grey and neglected corridor and uncover what has painted the misery on Eric's face? Do I find David, do I seek the stories that lie beneath his happy and exuberant facade?

Do I take the pill that will end the beating life within my stomach?

My hand curls around my abdomen and strokes it gently, as the bells surrender into the approaching anticipation of my decisions.




                                                                                                                        (by Rosie)