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There was no hope for him this time: it was his third stroke.*
The muggy cretonne’s smell in his nasal breath. The grey blinds slanting, seeping in the sunlight. It formed a strange pattern, straight streaks of orange.
Its funny, isn’t it, how smell can evoke memories.
Memories of what lie outside. Of the bazaar.
Bargaining women, drunken men jostling around, an occasional cow longing for the greens on a cart. High pitched chants of street side vendors.
Bags slung over shoulders, the colours of the market perspiring on a cheek.
Reminiscence.
My body was like a violin and her words and measures like fingers that play. Happenings on dark street corners, on a field of lilies, of summer dresses, all seamlessly converging in one long wail of a finger.
That finger.
The orange turns up slowly in its fury and converges into this shade.
Like the shade of her lamp.
The shade of the lamp that catches the curve of her neck, lights up her hair that rests there, and falling, the hand that rests on the railing.
It silently slips over the curve of her body and plays with the border of her dress.

He was graciously striding towards his late twenties then. A soft brown moustache and kind grey eyes. She liked the way she could look into them and all these stories seemed to just play on.
She was not listening to any of what he said.
The ship blew this long sad whistle through the mist. There was this impending feeling she had whenever she thought of that day. Of how the canvas of being seemed splashed with baubles of grey.
“Come”.
He spoke close to her face. She wouldn’t listen. All she did was was stare.
Their journey was all planned out. To go away. To start anew.
Where she would be married and get all the respect she deserved.
They met on the beach of their youth, two young people.
Him confident and sure of what lay ahead of him, while she pulled her cart along.
“Come”.
She buries her face in what she has of him.
Its strange how burying a face into an inanimate shirt, day after day, can evoke the same sentiments.
The intricacies of the soul are strange.
You hear so much of that cliché. If you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you, it is yours. If it doesn’t, it never was.
That never made any sense to her. Still doesn’t
So ok, I love something. Now what do I do.
Set it free.
How?
Don't know, just free.
Ok, there you go, now you’re free.
And while you are off wandering the world in that little boat of yours that costs a million, what am I supposed to do?
Go on with life.
But how? I am waiting for an answer, remember?

She is convinced it doesn’t work that way.

Say I love a part of me.
Ok, my tresses.
I love my tresses.
So does that mean I chop it off and put it in the ocean?
And wait for eternity for that bag to return, in my city without an ocean.
If I love something, I wouldn’t set it free.

But she did, that day.
That day overlooking the little boat, she did set him free.

Don’t you just love the way the forbidden fruit tastes?

Doesn’t it give you that excitement like when you were two years old and saw this bucket full of water, you dipped your face in it. And the way the water dripped from your hair, nicely hanging on your face.

Now you know you could have drowned.
Was your little two year old spirit trying to set you free in ways that you couldn’t understand back then?

She does not have an answer.
He doesn’t either.
What are answers anyway?


Note from the author: maxims/ sayings/ proverbs should come in a box with exceptions to the rule/ statutory warnings.
* First line in Joyce's Dubliners