A butterfly flies its cocoon A bear crawls out of hibernation A hermit crab changes its shell And lambs are always born in spring My metamorphosis and arrival is nothing like theirs. I have slept and awoken each season to find me, and even after emerging from my cocoon and I have changed my shell and crawled out of hibernation with the aims of reinventing myself. And with neither version perfect, my will and my expectations and those of others force me back into hibernation once more.
Perhaps I’ll find my perfect shell instead of making a Frankenstein of myself, maybe on my final awakening I’ll finally understand who and what I am, but for now I’m still none the wiser and still being reborn.
When one door closes, another opens. Yet I am trapped in these four walls. For me, one has closed and has stayed so, No escape from ceiling to floor. Just me as it always has been. If I close my eyes and think hard enough, I imagine I have keys to a door right in front of me. I reach into my pocket pushing aside gum and other miscellaneous items, and reach for the heavy brass key that I know fits. I look for the lock on the door, and slide it into the orifice. I twist the key in the lock, lower the handle And as long as I keep my eyes shut from the darkness outside of my eyelids I am freed to blue skies, freshly cut grass, the love of my life and a Porsche parked on the street that is ready to drive into the horizon. My love and I bound into the car. I push her hair back with one hand Staring lovingly into her eyes We kiss, one hand on the steering wheel. I reach into my pocket to search for the keys And as I grasp and fingers meet thumb, Darkness surrounds me once more As my eyes open I notice, No girl, no blue sky And most tragically No door.
It was the way he completely ignored the purpose of the bread knife at the table and used the dinner one instead. It was the way he stuffed the napkin into his collar before looking at the menu. He reminded me of Stan.
Stan and I met at Oxford when I was in first year. We first met at a freshers party off campus in the condition that one would find anyone during freshers week, either desperate, lonely or drunk.
The latter had occurred ironically at a party with me moderately inebriated clambering into a second year’s toilet in my kitten heels, only to find a paryletic man emptying his guts into the toilet.
After pushing his head to the side of the bowl so I could pee, he looked up at me bleary eyed before he finally passed out in a heap on the floor muttering expletives. I kicked him over on to his side just in case, and finished my wee.
I remember two colours from that night. The salmon pink of the vomit and the khaki green of his boxers which at this point were exposed just enough for you to see the majority of his bottom in them.
I glanced back to the bathroom door and pulled the remaining toilet paper off the roll using half of it to wipe his sick off the bottom of my shoe and the other to wipe my bits. I flushed the toilet, fixed my hair in the mirror and told the person waiting about his complimentary toilet attendant and human footstool that was now snoring on the floor.
The next morning after nursing a stinging headache and narrowly vomiting into my laptop bag on the way to my first lecture, I noticed something familiar as the man in front of me bent down to pick his cigarettes up off the floor.
“Nice boxers” I said. Looking slightly confused he turned to me squinting his eyes trying his best to recognise me while pulling a Marlboro Gold from the pack. He clumsily began searching front and back pockets for his lighter, with no success. He managed a muffled “Have ye got a light?”, cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth, spare hands still searching for his long lost lighter which occurred to me was probably drowned in the vomit from last night’s toilet adventure.
I reached in my jacket pocket and offered him my yellow SpongeBob lighter. “We’ll be late you know, to the lecture”. I looked him up and down. He was bearded, scruffy yet intentionally so, good looking even. Liam Gallagher type, green eyes. “It starts at 9.30 and it’s like 9.28”. He pushed his hair back out of his face after three unsuccessful flicks finally lit his cigarette. He took a long drag filling his lungs with smoke and in a thick Scottish accent he breathed on the exhale, “You better hurry up then lass, before ye get the cane.”
Lass? Who says lass? Cane? I rolled my eyes, raised my eyebrows, turned and marched toward the lecture hall. I arrived just in time to not be embarrassingly late yet apparently according to some cardiganed blondes on the front row who gave me the spikiest side-eye, not on time enough by their standards.
The hall was filled with chatter and the clap of nervous introductory handshakes. Obvious loners scrolled on their phones in the pews to not appear so and the trust fund buddies who knew each other from private schools in surrounding affluent areas stood around hands pocketed exchanging stories from their European summer holidays and hearts they had broken.
I crept up the creaky stairs of the hall and found myself a space on the sixth row back next to a scrolling loner. We exchanged matching disinterested looks of acknowledgment as I sat down and reached for my laptop which was fortunately not drowning in vomit.
The title on the screen read ‘Agricultural Economics in Peru’. I began writing the title in my notebook, and just as I’d written my final word, the bearded Scotsman bursts into the hall, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to be five minutes late to the first lecture of the academic year. He undoes the zip on his parka, throws it over the chair on the platform, does up his top button, picks up the clicker, the room quietens, the blonde bitches stop clucking, the blazered trust fund buddies disperse and Dr Stan Russell begins delivering the lecture on the agricultural economics of Peru. I suddenly feel sick all over again.
