the tyranny of stuff

The early morning sun gives coy hints about the contents of this room.  Partially refracted by the dust hanging heavily in the air, the light wavers, undecided, and the room takes on a stagnant pallor.

The light snakes its way across the floor to the walls, where cards, letters, words of encouragement have been taped onto unfazed plaster.  Stretched as though on the rack, each missive threatens to pull apart; the hills and valleys of their individual hands flatten and unite into an enormous, rambling, exasperating morass of empty, ignorant goodwill.  The clock ticks.

Between each curling sheet, picture frames grant the wall a true topography, their simple shining edges blocking out the words from the thousands.  Each proffers its own vision of the hated past:  a forced smile at a forgotten party, a late capture of a beauty lost before the aperture, a stinging reminder of the insignificant smallness of Man before Nature.  Dust cakes on all of it, has caked, will cake.

There, the desk where I traced those troubled scrawlings that eventually banished me from this place.  There, the chair whose shape my back will strive to match, to my anguish, until I die.  There, the broken cup.  And there, the carved enforcer of my solitude, there, where the sun now falls.

My eyes would look elsewhere, the books, the mottled ceiling, the crooked blinds, but all is drawn back to the cup.  The cup, the cup, the cup, the cup!  The light reaches even there, and curves around the broken lip, still shining in its vicious sharpened edge.  Its deep, slow curve, its tender descent into the well where you can find -- yes -- you can find a single crimson drop.  Blood or wine, it doesn't matter.

But look!  Here I stored a globe, until the neighbor remembered it; and here, a parrot perched one day, after flying in my window, and spoke to me politely in perfect Mandarin; and here, the children of my brother set themselves to play, and damaged the cheap little Turkish rug I had bought at the farmer's market, and I was cross, but still I laughed...

And here, at last, the chair in which you sat, and I offered you the cup, and you knocked it away, to splinter on the empty piece of wood I called a desk, and there to stay!

But now the sun moves on its way, and I on mine; the light is past, and all is clothed in the grim and heady shadows of yesterday.  The walls, the floors, the books, the glass of the window and my keepsake of you; to the touch, all is dust, and I must bid it farewell -- or stay, and quietly give myself over to my own accumulations.