Leila trampled down the creaky wooden stairs, thudding sound echoing through the meekly ventilated basement. For a moment she stood in silence eyeing the room in its totalitarian mess. A few seconds and she started to move. Ransacking the place, curtaining through cobwebs, jumping over a few broken throw-aways — her eyes located it.
The Table. Now, old and lifeless. A thick layer of dust dominated its shine-n-sheen. She gouged out the table from the debris pile, fumes of dust hazing the sordid walls. Pushing the table through the plastered floor, screeching sound creating a harmony with the uneven base, she felt a twinge she enjoyed as a child. She loved it still.
Standing at the foot of the basement, she wondered how to push it up the already dilapidated few stairs that ceased making connection with the slice of wide blue visible. Leila was already heaving, but knew what it meant to get into the momentum and gave a hard push to the table up the stairs. Finally out of the dungeon, every cell of the dead wood and her inside-dead body was inhaling, serendipitously uncaged.Her Tee was drenched in salt. Her face glistening from sodium droplets.Her heart pumped hard, and for reasons she couldn’t fathom, her lips widened into a forgotten stretch, she knew as smile. A signature mark of the rebel inside, companion to silent triumphs, which proliferated into events only the inner-her celebrated.
Shards of moments that make a whole.
She pressed her palm on the uneven, mildly prickly surface of the table.An old, antique heirloom. Still retaining its heft.The weight of time and life. Lived. Leila pull-skated the table inside the house, walking down the freshly mowed grass of the patch of green she nurtured, satiating her lust for verdancy, and made it rest near the entrance. Her lady-friday, Gina, now accustomed to her mistresses whims, looked up from her dusting routine for orders:
“Leave it alone, Gina, I’ll do it”.
Leila’s voice trailed as she entered the store room to gather her brush, paint and polish cans. She walked passed the abandoned mirror that now lay slanted on the floor. The crack still stark and clear, her image split into half — she saw herself. A surge of nausea rose from her gut to reach her tongue, memories like her sharp kitchen knives slashed through her body.But her veins were too dry to bleed. The limited edition, designer mirror in her room lay unacknowledged as she stopped looking at it for many days now.
The last day she saw herself, was the day she wished she didn’t.
But today her face looked blood rushed, satiny and young — almost unrecognisable. Leila quickly picked the collectables and rushed out of the room. By afternoon, the table was cleaned, sawed to even, polished with a fresh coat of paint. The weathering slid under the touch of her expert hands which numbed after that day….. It’s been seven months now, betrayal and abandonment mingling in her bath salt, she felt a little morsel of her coming back today.
To Gina’s un-expressed sighs, the old table replaced the new, which now found home in the basement. The aged, mahogany furniture adjusted itself beside the refrigerator and in front of the kitchen workstation.
The crush of time could not berate it of its loft and dignity. But the charm lay in its veins, polish making them speak — aesthetically moving through its body, giving the table its uniqueness ,the world devours. Leila, placed three sticks of lily neatly in her favourite blow-glass vase placed at the centre of the refurbished piece. A new coat of paint made the timbre look almost new. The scratches, the scars breathed free. Finally, they found a place to hide.
From Leila’s Pages: If there is something called mind, it keeps churning the threads of life–some acquired from the exterior distant world, some conjured from the caves of the home. The tumbler keeps shaking till the threads form a cloth, dons unborn colours and remains unfaded when exposed to the sizzling sun. They are stories Leila secretly journals and sometimes decides to share with the world.
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