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Step forward. Please come, please enter, and sing this song of life and death.
Everything will be alright.
Every day is a routine and a wonder. You cannot quite decide on the word. Routine ? Wonder ? The black row of black shirts in the closet. Decim’s eye twitching and spinning like a trapped butterfly in an eye-socket.
There are stars in this world. You have never seen them shine, yet you can feel the gentle pressure against your eyelids, closing them every night to begin another dream.
Turning and moving circles, like the diagram of a bizarre universe where only memories of day past linger; the turning wheel of fortune, except there is no fortune, nor future, only a quiet (yelling, crying, screaming) end. All of this existing in a single orb of frosted blue. Reflected in the ice cubes and in the glasses; in the giant aquarium and the jellyfishes’ eerie sways. You wonder. You do not have a name. What is your place, in this world of floating memories? Are you a bottle of alcohol, a water drop, a strand of white hair, a piece of black, black fabric?
It is so easy to sigh and be tired. All the faces of the drifters walking by, forming odd, contingent pairs: they merge but remain clear mirrors in your own head. You can remember them fairly well. The old lady. The violent man. The young beautiful woman. Lovers. Killers. They all lived a life, and they remember.
When you sigh Decim looks at you. He tries to make out the delicate threads that fail to hold you up. He tries to understand; at first he doesn’t. But then, softly, slowly, he does; he puts a warm velvet blanket on the sofa. He makes you a hot chocolate. He says “Hello” in the morning and makes it feel like not having a name is the most common thing in this universe.
You are: a bottle of lemon juice, a crystal glass, a mesmerizing jellyfish. You are: a row of clothes in a closet, an odd dream about children, an absent star high above, and a white, white eyelash.
Watch the butterfly caught in a tempest of old memories; watch it reclaim its spot, watch an eyelid close and open up again. Blink, blink. Green-blue-breath-taking eye. You are: a mystery to this wheel of fortune. You are: an absence and a presence. A paradox. A butterfly.
You sometimes want to kiss this face. It looks soft to the touch.
Instead, you catch a strand of his hair and pull lightly, until he is lying against you on the sofa, until he rests his head on your lap and lets you play with the snow-white hair. He likes it; doesn’t show it, mostly looks lost until he’s too sleepy to care. His deepened breath gives him away.
Sooner or later, you are no longer an oddity. You belong to the routine and the marvel. The people who enter see you and Decim, Decim and you. You are: part of a strange, contingent pair. The duo of the fifteenth floor. Decim and the woman with black hair. Two. You are: two.
And the routine is a pattern scattered on the butterfly’s wings, fluttering in surprised awe. You fall asleep every night. You wake up every morning. You stare at the wheel of fortune that shines in Decim’s eye. He stares back at you with a puzzled look, like he cannot decipher your very existence. Like you’re a mystery. “Mystery”, that’s how they should call you.
He is a mystery, too, but you are much more a mystery to yourself; he’s quite easy to understand, under all the grey white chalk and the sternness. His smiles are easy to notice, and rare, and pretty. His surprise is unguarded and open, much like his shame. He talks only when he wants to say something.
You kiss the top of his head. He is sleeping. He doesn’t stir awake.
A nebula: this is a word you’ve been searching for. Bright and magnificent, far, far away, undisclosed to your curiosity. It falls and breaths and lives in another world, the world of the living memories. The past has disappeared in you but it still belongs to you, somehow. You once were someone, too. You belonged under the nebula and the stars. You were: you.
Does Decim dream? Do images of the bar’s quiet shadows, of the aquarium’s dancers, haunt the slippery slopes of his sleep? You will ask him when he wakes up. You will say “Hey, Decim” (maybe you won’t say his name, or maybe the “hey” will stay unsaid). “Do you dream?” “Do dreams wake you up in the morning?” “Is there snow and children ghosts in your head when you sleep?”. Maybe you won’t ask, after all. This all seems so weird to you. Asking. What if he doesn’t dream? What if there is a gap between “Decim” and “The black-haired woman”? A breach you cannot fix, a discontinuity that will force them to call you “Mystery”.
The taste of alcohol. Dangerous and sweet – like a surrender, like a challenge. You like alcohol. You like vodka and lemon juice; you like strawberry with canella and light-hearted cherries. Red green yellow blue shining in a transparent glass; the ice cubes, fresh and as delicious as everything else. It’s a wake-up call to your senses and it puts your sense of alarm to sleep. Nona loves it. She enters the bar like she’s its queen and sits and Decim makes a cocktail. It’s always a surprise; it’s always a delight: Nona loves it. You wonder: was it like this, before I was there? You feel like you are intruding on some strange love affair, like you just put your feet in the middle of a waking volcano. Were they like this, alone, before I? It seems strange: the flame exists before the butterfly is born and before it is attracted to it.
Will you burn because you left the gas on, like that last couple of dead customers? Will you drown in your own sorrow and cut your wrists and lie, waiting, in a bathtub? Everything seems a potential end, but no: You are there with Decim and Decim says “Hello” to you like it’s a custom, your custom, a habit you have: say “hello” like there will be a day following the hello. It isn’t an end it is only a future. And when the dead re-enter the lifts, it is with one thing in mind: the future. Where will I go? What is my destination? Where will the other go? Will I ever see this bartender and this black-haired woman again?
He furrows his brows slightly when he feels your index touch his eyelid. The future. Does this blue wheel of fortune see it? Or is it only capable of reaching past, never forward?
You are: a future with no past. You are: a routine. Extant and wonderful. You are: The tingling of ice cubes against the glass. An eerie dance in a giant aquarium. Accept your fate; be a part of this odd couple, of this strangely quiet bar. Fifteenth floor. Get out of the lift, step forward.
Everything will be alright.