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There is an odd sort of novelty about the concept of being new to something. Like experiencing the light delicate flutter of a first-time snowflake melting upon skin, or the near-therapeutic lurch in your chest when you reel up your fishing line and come face to face with the first catch of your life. Or to phrase it plainly, in the context of a four-legged piece of contemporary furniture; when you’re freshly unboxed, pulled out prematurely of your eternal slumber by warm, delicate fingers that proceed deftly to put you together. To fix you rightly, assemble you from pieces to a whole; the world around you morphs into an ethereal paradise you wake up to. You’re coated in sliver, woken up only to realise your ineffability; oh the silver-skinned me, that nightly was gifted with the ability to excite! To charm and to add colour into his life! I was (in the most impossibly truthful, non-narcissistic way possible) the light of his life, fire in his soul and the stars behind his eyes. He deposited an hour at least, daily to be by me. There was no doubt that he adored me. (Nearly as much as I adored him.) Nothing mattered to me more than to have things continue the way they were.
Dispatched from the confines of my cardboard walls, a gradual routine that I had grew accustomed to took its form in nightly sessions with cigarettes and smoke. Sometimes, on days more sparing were intermittent daylight breaks where he leaned back, rested his arms against mine. I was perennially mute as he was silent. Together we would watch as the moon vanished and only to prepare for the sun’s debut in its place. On days when the clouds never really dispersed and the skylights failed to break clear, he would sink in deeper always, yet ever closer and closer against me. In the pervasive silence, I swore that I could have almost deciphered the sound of his sonorous brainworks. They ring and tick away; almost systematically like clockwork, as he inhaled the translucent smoke from the curious stick in between his fingers. He sighed. His relentlessly mechanized brain comes to a halt, with its fresh produce now ready for clinical inspection. In what form could such a product partake? I could never really quite lay a finger on that…or on him rather. Him and his perpetually troubled form.
Yet, I wished, so so much to help. Was he going to be okay? If his thoughts were as inundating as was his presence to me, could I possibly help? If only he could hear! The tremble of my fears, virulent emotions fettered and flung, sparsely in all directions with every mute and minute movement of his fingertips; blunt nails drawing imaginary roads my arms. Prolonged silence and shadowy daybreaks kept him most morose, most mute. And in his silence I feared every moment - for him, with him, him.
If I was born with the ability to excite, he existed with the gift of omnipotence over me.
His power over me, had been born at first sight, at last sight, and at ever and ever sight.
There was no way out.
Even then, when I alone had been tormented by the impossible thoughts of an eternity of such nights of togetherness, lonely nights had always eluded my mind. The warehouse lights were always aglow with warm ember rays, just as the warmth of his presence that illuminated mine. With me, we co-existed. He never spoke word. His eyes when they scrutinised, were as always a galaxy of stars, a Milky Way of deep-seated emotions, intertwined and complex, flecked with occasional breaks of recognition? Admiration? Compassion? I could never really tell, but neither would I have been in the place to find out. They glossed under the light, like spilt water over clear glass, there was a story of pristine sadness they told; tears that threatened to spill but never really had the chance to head for their destination point at all. These thoughts that caused such inward abysmal despair, I never did, hear, because they had always came as they went- unspoken. He had always longed for a listener, I could tell.
I longed too, to be his ear.
But he could and will never tell.
It didn’t matter. For that pair of bright eyes watched by me at night, underneath the warehouse lights was the sun on their own, prime host to a solar system that sat I, loyal and vainly conspicuous as a distant planet could be. But soft, was the sunlight and keen were those eyes, always looking out for scratches and blemishes, blots of dirt and dust that collect on my ornate designs, always polishing these minuscule hiccups upon my still body.
Those nameless days of mine were blissful, each and every moment of his watchful days and delicate polish-ups, I savoured.
But increasingly those ephemeral days of watchful silent nights, seemed to fly away from me, in a whirl of pale, differentiated, drifting scraps, like the morning snow storms of balled cotton a train passenger sees, whirling in the wake of an observation car.
The warehouse lights gradually ceased on come on for week. And it was from that week on, that weeks became morphed into fortnights that metasized into months.
During which, my world was sundered.
I was left to dust, cornered and solitary. Sometimes left maudlin, having had my hopes falsely teased by the occasional entrance of his newest edition. (I must confess, what polished exteriors they have! How I paled in comparison with my washed-down colour, sun-soaked differentiated shades.) Those were the days that turn into weeks that transformed into years.
Silence was a relentless blizzard of dust and gusts of soundlessness.
+
December morning; footsteps, his low velvety voice fused with the sibilant, slivery whisper of a female voice. It did not matter to me who she was, or what spelled her purpose of visit; it was his footsteps. And him edging closerclosercloser to me, with every step he took.
‘Welcome to my private warehouse. You’re the first guest down here… I guess you can take your pick.’ He said gesturing at us.
“Whoa……oppa! They’re gorgeous.” came her bright, exuberant exclamation. His gaze lingered on her. He had eyes that spoke something more than admiration. “That one..” she muttered, finger raised and northward in my direction. “I want that one.” She repeated again, tugging coquettishly at his sleeve.
“You can’t—pick another one, love.”
“Why not?!” She mumbles, half-impish as she makes a show of stomping her foot childishly against the ground.
“Because Jiyong is—“
“Jiyong? Is that what it’s called, the designer? Or its brand?”
“Its…” Seunghyun glanced in my direction, almost wistfully. “It’s just… it’s just called Jiyong…” He walked toward me, tender digits resting on my washed out-lineaments. “It’s a special chair, with a lot more history to it.” He mused, looking over at her thoughtfully.
“I’d like to keep Jiyong, do you mind picking another one? How about--”
What ensued after, I had no heart to listen. Everything was a dazzling and assaulting blur. I was only beginning to register that I had an identity - a name. It was more than I could’ve ever asked for.
What I thought marked the second chapter to our time together turned out only to be contrary to everything else.
Jiyong is less of Jiyong when his name-giver becomes absent in justifying its existence.
In an age of despair one begins to find remorse in the smallest of happiness’s miseries. My biggest regret remains to this day, the wretched feeling of vehemence when he walked out with her, bearer of that Tinkerbell laugh, breathy whispers and captive of his heart.
Days dissolved into nights that were reborn as days. Lights flickered on and off as the switch tips down only to be tipped up over and over again. New additions arrive, with his increasing desire to expand his collection. The chairs poured in, abundant in all variations, shapes, dimensions and every other geometrical generality. Each had in common, the novelty of being the dazzling star to his increasingly sunken dimmed and night-blowned wistful eyes. The antiquated are discarded.
I never really had control over my life anyway.
I knew, that right from the day the parts of me came together into a whole, the span of my life had been pre-determined. Objects stayed for as long as they kept their function. Weariness and age had rendered the prime contribution of mine to be obsolete; my service to him was never more to please the eye than to bring him comfort in the form of lush cushions and protracted rest.
My greatest gratification perhaps, came today, in the form of an awakening (pardon the irony). Specifically, morning, when I had the privilege of being told in private, during his tedious process of dismantling and putting away the pieces, the sweetest lullaby.
“Jiyong. My most feeling chair,” with calloused fingers, he held on to the cardboard lids.
A gentle, benign smile played upon his lips as he cajoled me into an eternal slumber, uttering his final disyllabic parting, “Farewell.”
Would such a situation beget a cause for sadness? Not quite. Not at all. Not really. Ironically, I felt none of that. Rather oddly, I cannot describe the immediate exultation that roared within me, when the cardboard roof descended and sealed the fate of my perpetual resting ground.
I was far too fixated see; on the single fact that Seunghyun the human had actually addressed Jiyong the unliving object. Personally.
In the dark, rectangular confines presently and retrospectively, I have no doubts, no hesitations at all that this has been a life lived well. The human sends off the chair, with all due acknowledgement of its humanism. Who would have heard of such an oddity, outside even the realm of fairytales?
There is no place in this world, for the inanimate. No place for the immovable, object. A human heart cannot simply ever be moved, by the soulless - an object along with its inhumanness. The human heart beats only to be pleased, foolish object!
Foolish, Jiyong!
Why is it a strange realization then, that the sphere of the living simply could not intersect the sphere of the non-living? Bodies are anatomical manifestations of barriers that separate two souls. Minds resonates opinions, hardly in tandem with what the heart feels. Language is the schism that pulls apart people, the catalogues them into different cultures. But, objects and people, strange how they exist! Together! In cohabitation! Distance between them both can shrink until there’s none left, during their interactions (He sits, sees the stars with me), but yet.
But yet, the distance of emotional intimation, he and I can never, cross.
Even in death, one would’ve taken pride in having once lived.
But the non-living? They never lived.
So, rest assured, reader. Because within these four walls, I will never die.
(For I never really, lived.)