もしもの話

黒澤ルビィ生誕祭

As is the custom with the act of rising from one’s slumber, my eyes woke up first and surveyed their surroundings. Unlike my eyes, my thoughts, still clutching on to the thresholds of sleep, were still unprepared to confront and acknowledge its duty of making sense of the world. The acute chirping of birds that signaled the beginning of day, the rough texture of my bedsheets that caught my skin, the damp smell of morning, all contributed to working through the rupture between my mind and its brief sanctuary of the senses. As my mind found itself gradually being forced into the captivity of the world external to itself, it struggled and rebelled against its new captor and tried to escape its clutches. As a result, my senses and thoughts being in direct conflict with each other, all I could make out of the bright white light that my mind had conjured in its strategic assault against my senses, were disoriented fragments and figments of my life that I had left behind and forgotten to record the chronological sequence of when I climbed into bed the day before. I hardly recognized any of the pseudo objects that I saw, as the light instantly engulfed anything that made itself vaguely coherent and tangible.　However, in this midst, I saw a single object gently emerging from the light, as if it alone remained impervious to the light’s endeavors, and silently protested its existence to me. I recognized it as the little tapestry that hung on my wall opposite to where I usually slept. On the tapestry was a young girl of 15, wearing a simple vest over a collared shirt and a white mini-skirt. The vest she wore was of a very modest blue as if it was undecided on what kind of tone it should set for its wearer, and this ambiguity of her vest bled into the white collared shirt that she wore, weakening and releasing the heavy formality of her shirt. By contrast, the whiteness of her skirt and the pair of gloves that she wore was anything but vague, and the blinding coherency of the color of these garments seemed to give an irrefutable statement concerning her delicate innocence and virginity. The fragrance of purity that was hinted at by the pieces of garments that she wore seemed to add a new golden pink glow to her skin, giving her the impression of a freshly washed plum that caught and glistened in the morning light, its sensual juices that it contained just waiting to burst out of its skin. Her arms were poised outwards, her right arm boldly extending and pointing toward the heavens and her left arm firmly planted on her hips. Her outstretched arms seemed to be beckoning me forward and as I looked upon the girl as a whole, it was to my surprise that I unexpectedly responded to her summoning, causing a slight trimmer within the depths of my soul. I felt within the crevices of my soul a new rekindling of an old feeling which had once been the central pivot of my life as I had tended to and nurtured these emotions of endearment for her in my younger years. These sparks of my previous affection and devotion to this girl brought feelings of both nostalgia for what I had been and pitiful regret for what I had now become, and the acknowledgement of my undeniable betrayal to her which now stained my soul brought flowers of regretful tears to my eyes. And as I strived to look past my tears and reconnect myself with the little girl, the intensity of my passion related itself to her through my gaze and augmented the very quality of the particulars which had so adhered and captured me in my youth. Her everlasting smile, which I found traces of my former endearment the most, whispered and begged me to desire for the unspoken expressions of innocence that lay beyond her and formed her whole composition. Oh how I longed to grasp and feel its weight, its depth, its divinity poring over my palm, so that I could once again make myself experience and understand what it was that made her so alluring and precious to my very soul! But as soon as I started to look deeper for the roots of my youth in the little girl, I felt the flame of my passion tremble and flicker. The young girl started to lose its subtle seductiveness and the healthy pink blushes of her skin slowly turned into a dull lifeless light red as if the vitality of her youth was radically being deprived of by her new found mortality. I tried desperately to cling on to the remaining embers, and in an effort to impede this process of this metamorphosis, blew wisps of what joyous memories I still had of her into the diminishing flames. But the memories I blew were but memories that had lain in the dungeons of my mind for a long time, stale, untouched, uncared for, and deprived of the warmth of its keeper needed to keep the memory vibrant with life and meaning. The memories which I recalled and drew upon in my desperation did nothing to rekindle my endearment, but on the contrary emphasized the rotting poignant stench and consequences of indifference that I had let it accumulate over these several years. I spoke the girl’s name, hoping that the air pumping out of my lungs, the inflections I made with my tongue which struggled to give form and shape to my adoration would physically help anchor my feelings of ardour. But the sound that came out of my lips made no impression on my body as it echoed hollowly throughout the room, a sound of dismal finality. Objects of my room gradually started to materialize within my sight and I was left alone in my room with tears coursing down my face, seeing but not relating to these epitomes of the mundane. The inauthenticity of the objects that had never truly been mine to begin with brought fears of solitude into my heart and I felt myself drowning and suffocating in that room of isolating grief. Thus, the punishment and immortality of the present took its deadly toll on my soul, waving aside my fruitless efforts to recover the past, and I had no choice but to choke myself back to sleep with my tears, trying to forget the enslavement and torture inflicted upon me. But before my captor gave me rest from its clutches, I saw from the corner of my eye a dull little girl drawn onto a piece of miserable cloth, staring at me with a hollow smile, refusing to whisper anything that had any meaning to me. There was only silence and I felt that that was all there was going to be as I closed myself off to the world.