Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
21 November 2011
20 November 2011
the traveling hat
Joaney was moving out. She littered the living room with boxes, scarves spilling out of one, pens and paper tumbling out of another, clothing stuffed into the old fashioned trunks she kept for the day she would deliver herself to some new place. As she took down her art and maps, the walls of her windowless room exposed themselves shamefully, grubby in their nakedness, the crooked, graying gypsum board having never been dignified with a paint job. Here was a building built for moving, built for moving out. The living room grew bigger as she shuttled away her boxes and bags to other lands, their names unknown. The windows looked on, remembering their warehouse days, and the alley waited apathetically for the moment it would have to say goodbye. The weather grew colder with autumn's approaching end, and the wind howled on through the cracks in the concrete.
She left on a Thursday, for distant realms in northern climes. There was a movement to follow, a city to sack, photos to be taken and journals to be filled. She gave me a hug and I admired her lightness, and pondered my weight.
She left me a hat, a peaked little straw thing with a curled brim around the back and a brown ribbon around the crown. It sat quietly on the windowsill in that first day of Joaney's absence, patient and kind. It was an optimistic sort of hat, brave and awake, always at the ready. The afternoon faded into an early darkness, with the resigned expression of a chaotic year on its way out the door. Winter marched in through the windows and I fell into a deep sleep under a high pile of blankets as the invading cold set up camp in the apartment. I awoke not two hours later, wide eyed with rest, and wandered into the living room, where all the wintery phantoms breathed softly in their slumber with the whir of the city below, billowing softly from the nests they had built in the bricks. The room glowed with a new Spartan independence in its uncluttered state, and there sat the hat, its peaked little face tilted towards the glass pane of the window, staring serenely at the skyline.
The cold quit me in that moment, staring at the silhouette of the hat. It greeted me silently, without turning my way: Good evening, dear. Without hesitation I took up the hat, the way men grab their lovers in the last hours of the night, and I marched to my bedroom, away from the distant laughter of the jostling revelers in the street below. The hat was here now, mine for just this moment. I fingered its springy straw construction, and admired the cheeky brown grosgrain that encircled its crown, investigating its imperfect undulations around the brim.
I tossed the hat onto my bed and I stripped naked in the cold, sliding the door shut to face a full length mirror, the yellow glow backlighting my silhouette, my body having grown soft and pale in the darkness of winter. Goosebumps rippled across my skin the way fallen leaves twirl on sidewalks on suburban roads, and I felt as quiet as the moon. I stood straight, my chin up and my wits gathered, as if my train had come to meet me on the platform. The hat joined me there, perched on my head like a wise advisor from some exotic tradition. The hat gave the signal. With one last push, we stretched up and out, expanding and writhing in the mirror’s frame, and marched right into it traveling.
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