Jenna's obsession with party .. |
Jenna is on her way back right now; she’s in her cab, a junked yellow mantrap clanking through an empty stretch on a muggy night, that’s been more like the outsides of a beer can – glistening with sweat, reflecting light of its dark, slender fluid body, pinched by beads of red, green and blue neon, that simmer with a silent, palpable breath melting into the giant yawn of the sky. Jenna’s eyes are of course, on the wind and in the air, her head cocked to the right, a hair-strand holding her face and the night’s inky brightness burning in them. She has the lean, sparse beauty of a woman who lives mostly in her mind, a pert nose, sharp finely etched lips, perpetually in a pout, holding a smile and grave thought, often together. She wears simple office-fare, trousers, crumpled white shirt and a bloated bag; in her hand, is her favorite metallic silver cigarette case, full of her long, tendril like slims. This is Jenna; this isn’t only her story, but we began with her because every story needs a moment, not opportune, not telling, but just a fraction, that balances the pull of the life or lives, we are looking at tonight. We can go back in time, flash-back to the day’s morning, when she wakes up in her large and comfy double bed, surrounded by pillows, white and inviting, sheets half turned and an ashtray in the middle. Jenna wears her favorite vest, a pink strappy thing, that playfully works on her small breasts and knickers that display her long, thin legs – a dryad maybe, or an androgynous page-boy, tossing in a mattress, with rich black hair spilling over – Jenna is beautiful like this. She hates the blankness of the light that invades her room through the window; its then that she calls out to Shaun and pushes herself up to ask him something. That’s what Jenna is thinking of, on her way back, in the cab; that morning; different was it? Or the same, merely a dot in the turning wheel that’s her life, moving back and forth, on and off, over and again, through a nice, blamelessly benign path that she’s chosen. Oh and there’s music in her head: a Cohen song, playing in the grey regions, the words, spinning on her tongue. Words, words have always been the glistening beings dancing inside her, furry glowing animals that promise an elongated plateau of languidness, connected to the spaces the world doesn’t give away every day, hidden caves where the mind is at one with the motion of time and beyond it, where the advent of life, its blue after-trail is always within the palm, words that dissolve all the frozen stuff inside Jenna, into one ceaseless, incandescent ball of energy flowing out, in immaculate conception, like the ordered chaos of fractals. And Jenna’s home; so is Shaun. He darts a couple of random instructions; it seems they have a party to reach, and like always it would do good to imagine they can get there early – move in quick, talk, mingle, drink, dance (maybe) eat or more likely, nibble, and move out – it is an office week. 538 words |