FRAGMENTS: A room of one's own.
three extracts from something longer.
'A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction'
Virginia Woolf: A room of one’s own.
i. On the floor is a glass of water. It sits next to a string of sunlight. The sunlight does not touch it. My bed is dark brown, think melted chocolate, a spilled coffee, the dirt under your feet, below the pavements, the houses, the shops. The dirt. My bed sheets are cream, lilac, a jumble of old linen, cotton, blankets half ripped. They might have once been white, but if you look carefully you’ll see the marks, stains, a cup of spilled tea that had been left on the bedside table too long, and one night, what a night, I decided to dance, and oh how I danced, all limbs and teeth, flailing my arms above my head while the record scratched on. Jumping, then stopping, then moving my hips around, in circles in zigzags, the pause between songs to catch breath. An Elysian evening, one that you feel drunk off, but I’m ten and I only know Jesus turned water to wine, so can drunkenness be that bad? Taken over by Dionysus, taken over by the child that lives inside me. Then another song, twirling around my room, then the mug falling, spilled tea, they spilled tears, and now a stain on my bedsheets and a scar on the foot because I danced barefoot. I clean it up in silence. The music has stopped. It’s thick evening, dark outside. Dionysus has left. There are faded stains that might be fruit stains. Stains of what it might mean to be thirteen, doe eyes, sticky eyelashes, 4 am, red fingers, salt in my throat; a pomegranate ripped open over lilac bedding. Raspberries that were plump but crisp and bled down my chin while I lay reading.
ii. I have a bed full of stains, of babe, of child, a slow progression into girl. There are stains I don’t like to remember and so I rub them with sugar or salt, the hot water and they fade until my sheets are pure enough that from a distance they look new. Nothing is new. My curtains are cream lace and soft cotton, slightly ripped at the bottom from years of catching them on the bottom of my feet when dancing around my room. They tangle in my toes and kiss along the scar, and when I stood on the roses I placed out to cut the stems, I got a thorn stuck in my toe and it bled and I cut that piece of lace out. I didn’t like to think of it, sitting there, next to its seafoam sisters, feeling dirty, forgotten, derogatory.
iii. My walls have not yet started to wonder: where is the girl we used to know? Because I have not changed that much. The door is solid; half an agony and half a hope. It shuts quietly. You will not hear it unless you stand right next to it. A small clink when it meets the lock.
On the small table are nine things.
Cotton socks
A cup of half-drunk tea
A letter, unopened, sealed in a kiss
A hairbrush
A book that dramatises the mundane: a journal
A locket. Rusted and elegant
Perfume to remind me of her. Rose.
A button
A ticket from the cinema. For one.
