Unfeeling

She remembered how back at home, between her mom who had become queerly possessive about her, and her dad who had gotten somewhat awkward around her, between those burdening breakfasts and dinners of quietude, between having to study integration of numbers and being made to expand her culinary endeavors, she felt limpidly torn between these nascent experiences, these impositions, these prescriptions, that she sometimes found too hard to attach her waywardness to; to not want to flee this rush of overwhelm, like this one rush she was about to feel, sitting in that bus, between the viscous sky above and the rolling sheet of road below her, rolling like those hormones in the pit of her stomach (or was it a bit lower?), tossing her like an autumn leaf towards the season of attraction; and attraction is what she was about to feel, feel and later dismiss, just like that autumn leaf, outcast and trampled by the righteous, the church-goers, the conformers.

So attraction is what she felt, on that bus, when this rather handsome girl sat by her side, uncertainty filling the brims of her ripening chalice, overflowing through the yet growing saplings, soaking her wet, like she were being fondled by those occasional grazes, so gentle yet so conquering, like there was a larger conspiracy involved, a larger intention.

She flinched this feeling away, sieving it out of the mesh of her emotional ambivalence, through those recesses she would later fill out with her suppression, thinking about the chores, those despicable chores that waited at home, the cake that her mom wanted her to bake, for which she had to acquiesce, to confirm her normalcy, inspite of wanting to rather read that book she was reading, the book that helped her escape into the ecstasy of likeness, like every line had a continent between it, and she read it over and over again, revisiting it, every time her existence seemed to melt in it’s core.

She disliked the way she had taken to the protagonist with such fondness because it made her feel only more whimsical about herself; but even so, she didn’t really resist this cohesion. She felt, after all, like the hostess to this party, serving compliantly to the beliefs and notions of the people at this party, in her life. She was, after all, buying flowers herself, on this day of hormonal irresolution, in this season of throttled attraction, in that hour, that long unforgettable hour, that hour of unfeeling, unfeeling this and that.

art url - here
art title - Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941)
courtesy - The New York Times
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