The Room

If this were a film, I’d know how to shoot it. The camera coming in from overhead, seeing the figure in a room, a silent room, doing nothing. A picture paints a thousand words, its true, but I can’t paint this picture for you, I can only tell it to you, and hope that you understand what I mean. Well, you have the opening sequence at least.

He sits there, in his room, the silent room that I mentioned (in the cinema the silence would be deafening, but here its just silence). Maybe its not true that he’s doing nothing, he’s thinking perhaps, twitching slightly, with his thoughts, and there’s no such thing as stillness because there is always movement, a twitch a heartbeat a pulse ticking tenderly in the neck. He might be crying, but I doubt it somehow, I think he is stiff, and still as humanity can be, fighting with himself, but you wouldn’t see any of this in the cinema, not unless the actor was brilliant, so maybe this way is better. So he sits there, this man, this boy in his room, in his silent room, this man who is not a boy and boy who is not a man, and he is arguing with himself. I am seeking a thousand words to make up for my picture that I have lost. There is a movement, a sound from outside the room, beyond the door, and a flicker of his eyes shows that the sound has his attention. So he gets up, but he doesn’t leave, he paces the room, unsteady and angry, as if trapped by the door, unable to operate the handle, but he can, I mean he’s not a freak or anything, the trapped-ness is in his head (you’d see this on film, but words, words are so tricky, so subtle and slippy and run and laugh away from your control making you say things you don’t mean) and he’s pacing and pacing, but the room is a mess, clothes and books get underfoot, and he swears under his breath and kicks at them. They make a noise, and he twists his head to listen to the noise outside, what is beyond the room, but there is nothing new and he is relieved, and makes himself sit down at his desk, types something worthless and his computer and turns and twists and wonders how long before he can get out.

Maybe I’d leave him there, a nice slow draw back up, away from the deafening silent room, go to investigate the noises. Other rooms, full of sound this time, and the sound would be deafening here too, because it would be an explosion of sound from the silence, and there would be shiny attractive people having fun, because in my world only shiny attractive people can have fun, so they’d have to be, and we’d leave him in his silent room and watch the people having fun. But fun is boring, so I guess we’d have to return, or maybe we’d see him, slipping along a corridor, avoiding the fun people (who’d be wearing bright colours, he in greys and blacks), maybe they don’t see him, but maybe he doesn’t want to be seen. He goes into the bathroom, locking the door with an audible sigh of relief. Around him is silence again as he is thinking, twitching and slowly undoing his belt. He’ll make every drop last, extending time itself until he has to leave the sanctuary of the room with the locked door, and when he does he is right because a shiny person finds him, and tries to talk to him, and he is forced to search deep deep deep inside (and how could I find an actor who would show how hard it is sometimes to find the words, to seek them out and force them up from your gut to your mouth, spitting them out and then all the energy is gone and the words and dead, killed by inadequacy or over-exertion or both) and then the shiny person’s light is dimmed a little, but not for long as he slips back to his room, shutting the door and it is as though he never was, and she is bright again, and he is tired.