Desperate

July 27, 2010 at 10:01 am · Filed under Prose and tagged: ordinary lives, Prose

She was a little surprised herself how vehemently she did not want to get up to go to work in the morning. The confines of her queen size bed felt quite safe from harm and she resisted, mentally, the motivation to move the sheets from her frame and to step onto the soft carpet.

When her alarm rang at seven in the morning her partner, Stuart, was invariably snoring resonantly and remained unmoved as she collected her clothing from the built-in wardrobe and walked into the adjoining ensuite bathroom.

For the first port of call in the morning, the bathroom was not a bad place to be. Unlike the rest of the apartment which faced, from every angle, the blank faced and unsmiling windows of countless other, homogenised apartment blocks, the bathroom window, which was set wide and low in the wall, had a view down a long strip of road to the beach. While it wasn’t something that could in any way be said to add to the value of the apartment, the glimpse of the cerulean blue ocean in the morning was a small reminder of her youth, which she believed she had now lost, and, in particular, it was a reminder of the reasons why she had moved to this city in the first place.

She was thirty-six when she first arrived. She was heartbroken and had very little money to her name. She chose her new place of residence on a preconceived, ultimately false, notion that it was an area which catered to people in the middle of their lives and that her story, one of trying very hard to succeed both in love and in her career, only to fail, would be common place, and not so much a cause for concern or pity, as it was in the city where she had spent the majority of her life – that corporate and expensive citadel.

She wasn’t naturally a person who did anything to excess, but when she had first arrived she had tried to forget her age and had moved into a neat, nineteen nineties, duplex with another woman a few years her junior and had indulged in wine drinking and erratic socialising with something she desperately hoped looked like happiness and enthusiasm.

In fact, it was anything but, and as the mornings moved on restlessly she found that she would have preferred to spend both day and evening in bed, sipping a cup of coffee and turning the pages of a romantic novel.  She was swept away by romances. Though she had never experienced anything like what she read on the pages of a Harlequin Mills & Boon, she nevertheless had a vague hope that in an unconventional sense she might still meet ‘the man of her dreams’ and that, unlike the first one she had met, this one would not leave her for a twenty-two year old Chinese girl who was a clerk in his law firm.

These were her only hopes and between yoga classes and nightly binge drinking sessions at the local nightclubs she kept them alive, nurturing them the same way she cared for her softening cheeks with the expensive lotions that her meagre income could scarcely warrant the purchase of.

Of course time has a way of eroding such hopes and so when she met Stuart she gave into the relationship with a sort of natural resignation. She didn’t believe he wasn’t ‘the one’, she just wasn’t unequivocally convinced of the fact. They got along very well. In fact, she could honestly say she considered him her closest friend in the world. But she stumbled around in their relationship as if someone has switched out the lights or tied a scarf across her eyes. She was feeling her way all the time – hopelessly doubtful of his fidelity and never really sure that she was any happier for being with him than she had been on her own.

Stuart, though, was helpful, and gave her the introduction she needed to a company in the city which required an ‘all rounder’ who could do some financial analyst skills (which she could) but who also wouldn’t balk at organising the coffee for meetings of the partners (which she didn’t). She realised that essentially the fellows who made up the partnership of the board were looking for a stand in mother or a salaried housewife. Someone who would complete the tasks they found too complicated or tedious to contemplate and someone who would clean up their dishes as they hated washing them.

She would be this woman as she had caught the cusp of a generation who believed this was intuitively and happily what a woman should be. Nevertheless, as time ceded and she did not feel any happier or excited to spring from her bed in the morning to face the day, she realised that she was not intuitively or happily anything. She accepted her fate with as much grace as she could muster and she assumed that like her, there were many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people in exactly the same state.

She thought of them at night as the lights flickered on in the apartment blocks surrounding her own and she took a little comfort away from the conception of solidarity. Thinking of them, she rested between the sheets of her bed, glad for the twelve hours of uninterrupted time she would experience in her room. The resonant sound of Stuart’s snores would come low and regular from his form, as he slept, curled in on himself, beside her, and she tried, on an unfailing daily basis,  to quieten her heart down so that each beat was melodiously in tune with the relaxed sound which he made.

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