She is lost
She is lost in the opaque script of the shadows. Each stage beyond your eye assumes a finer hold on her actions, further from your effect. Hands wring in the shadows, shivering profiles into and out of bolts of domestic light, hair sways through dappled apertures of silhouette and stocking feet stack and unstack with heel on ankle and toe on toes. In the shadows she sits in moments of differing actions. She gives to you a jumble of omens and talismanic body fragments. You know what they compose and where they condemn you. But in the script of shadows, loosened from you and from her is delivering misunderstanding. She sits at the kitchen table. Her hair on the right side hangs long across her face in wet plaits. It touches the table and coils onto itself and falls again as her head turns to the right, toward the corner of the room. Her hair is tucked behind her left ear. Her lobes are translucent and waxy. She pauses with her head cocked and feels the apartment on her skin. Its emptiness runs beneath her collar and she adjusts her neck reflexively and widens her eyes to the dark. She is folding cloth napkins slowly in to squares. Checked green and white squares divide the smaller folded squares. Her feet beneath the table alternate one heel atop the opposite foot, filling the night time.
She sits curved in a chair with arms and wings facing the wall. Her posture is expectant and empty and her eyes are still yet wandering. She is still. She looks at the white wall. Moisture stands in the texture of paint over painted over moisture. She watches for white to differentiate itself from white. Aged walls tell no stories. Her shadow is still. Long nights have no stories. She looks long in the plain full light of her apartment for things to emerge from the emptiness, a shadow, patterns, shades of white, glossy profiles, relief, contrast, relationships, the wide orange sky, dawn, the vast sunset horizon of the sea, glittering golden sunset domes, the emptying of her body into this vessel, the shadow of her empty body rising from the chair or turning to face the covered window. Nothing. The night lacks distance. Everything rests upon you, trepidation, concrete threats, threatening shadows, the emptiness waiting upon the threats racing dawn. In your closed eyes you project nothing out into the distance. You bear everything you cannot cast away through forgetfulness. Waiting in the armchair there is little to do. Repetitive tasks fill the day and give it cadence. The night is to be waited out and endured. She endures the unchanging light of the apartment. She endures control and its illusions. She controls the past. The odd reflections, the watery stains, the disheveled carpet nap are the traces of old effects. In the unchanging objective light of the milk glass lamps they are mute. They indicate nothing and they change nothing about what she recalls. Only you are distant. It is the muteness of these old effects that causes her eyes to tile them together into an interrogatory rebus. The night has no stories, only the manic effect of those dusk visions that crept toward her in the last grey shades of day played over and again on the pure emptiness of the blank painted wall.