Please stop it. I’ll myself break my, your, our…
I am quite in sane, haven’t gone mad, I am tired of searching me inside you. I am tired of offering you shelter inside me.
No, I am not crazy, but I am gonna to especially when mirage visits me. I have always hated this nonsense duty of a host. Think it is nonsense? Now you say it isn’t just the matter of duty, don’t you? It’s just to your liking whether you may receive the guests or you may not. But will you still hold the same view in case the guest comes to see you without warning or making a call to you. Moreover he enters your house without knocking at the door, helping himself to food in your own refrigerator without asking permission.
I lack the habit of locking the door. That is not the matter of trusting or loving just a door made of iron, wood, or something else, but this senseless device links us to the outside and farther outside of it. Yet there is another door still more important not made of an iron or wooed… but it connects your inside with the outside.
Outside, there is the external world. But what is there inside you? Only the owner knows. I have always thought it impossible to appear inside the world of others. Perhaps I have been right thinking so.
I have lived in my private house for 27 years. In fact it is an ordinary house very much like others’, surrounded with ordinary neighbours. Though calling ordinary might sound overly mild. I have always found it hard to understand my neighbor’s mindset or try to reveal it. I wonder why all the men in our yard can be found crept under their cars. They repair their cars more often than drive them. And women can always be seen sweeping the yard with a robe pulled on. So the primary mission of the gown has changed. It has become a kind of uniform to wear while sweeping the yards in our street.
Children almost always scream but seldom play. Children under 12 speak about the serials which have become part of their daily life or they speak about the girls or the boys they like best at their schools and even kindergartens.
In fact I never try to listen to their talking but simply I overhear it in coming down the street or while smoking in the yard. I rarely smoke, but when I do it, it takes me long to have a smoke. It’s like an endless gossiping which comes round between two young people who always get surprised at how people can afford to smoke. The girls and boys over 12 get together to bounce with their cords or if nothing is left to do they take over their duty that is to peal and peal sunflower seeds and never deprive themselves of the pleasure telling on or criticizing others and finding faults with the others. That’s not because they have nothing to do or they are lazy. O, no, that’s a kind of job that few people fit to it and succeed in doing it as it requires job experience and ”high education”. This is about farther outside. Let’s speak about just outside us. My house is very ordinary one. It is a three-room flat with a single balcony. It is furnished to the modern standard of fashion, but I have an old mirror and a clock in my room. They once belonged to my granny as far as I remember. I haven’t seen my grandmother, but she is said to be a strange creature. She could often be found sitting in her room in front of the mirror all day long counting the clock strikes till it was 60 and then smiling to herself in the mirror instantly she would wear a sullen look on her face. She was a beautiful woman yet few people could notice it. Some people evidence that she liked to wear adornment made of wood. Her neighbour, a young fellow used to make them for her in exchange to the opportunity to listen to my granny’s stories, which she used to tell him but she never finished those stories. That is what motivated the young man to keep designing new adornments and wait for the next story. The stories had nothing in common except that the main and single character; a girl who had no a cat. What sort of stories they were and how deeply they impressed the boy, nobody knows. They, that my granny died of heart attack at a young age. But that is not the point. The point is how the certain illness can be called when a person dies at the last striking of the clock; the monotonous and balanced striking, which can’t be continued endlessly. One day it stops-one, two, three- one, one, one…
Hence the same clock hangs above the same mirror without striking. It doesn’t tell me the time any longer. It is quiet. Always being unable to realise the mystery of both the clock and the mirror I stood before it every morning, looked into it, combed my hair and satisfied with my outfit I smiled to myself and left for work. I used to break off late. The works where I work as a manager isn’t near my house, but I am used to walking home every day.
I had a strange habit of finding a tiny stone in my way and by kicking it forward I managed to bring it up to my house. But that was not all I did. I always thought of someone before starting to give it the first blow, because I believed to meet that man as soon as I reached home. I once happened to succeed in doing it and so I kept on lying myself for a whole year that it would happen again.
I hate lying. But life is not life if you believe what is there and you are afraid of what is beyond the range of reality. By lying to yourself you can’t change the border between the reality and unknown. Only it is you that change your position to that line.
On that day I was again coming back home but later than usual. It was dark but I could find a stone which was bigger than usual. I had my salary on me, but I always keep surprising at my patience with which I worked the whole month waiting to receive it for one day or I keep working the whole year to have a three- week holiday only. When I get my salary I never think what I am gonna to spend it on, instead I think of my next salary. I received my salary that day. I was so much obsessed with my calculations that I quite forget to think of someone before I could blow the first kick on the stone. But after the fourth kick the stone appeared in the rain-pool. So strongly it fell into the water that it caused the water vibrate and get still muddier. I came up to that muddy rain-pool, stopped for a while trying to make out my own reflection in the pool. It had been a pure rain-pool, which was full of common dirt. But now a muddy rain-pool was before me and however hard I tried I failed to find the reflection of my image there. So I waited until it was calm again. I didn’t even try to take my stone out of it. Of course I wanted to find my stone but instead I found my reflection. It was not me, but it was my distorted image, as I thought it to be then.
At last I got home and I felt an immediate fatigue. I wanted to sleep. Holding a cup filled with tea in it I entered the room, put the cup on the table and took my watch off my hand. As I wanted to take the cup again I caught my glance in the mirror, but this time my image was reflected just the way I was: black hair, brown eyes, tired and pale face, dressed my daily professional attire and as usual with a loosened tie. Recollecting my image reflected in the rain-pool I sat before the mirror. With a few minutes of my stare look kept into it, I felt my recollections starting to mix in my head. I had never thought of either my past or the future. Never had I crossed the borderline of the day. The nightmare was there. It had arrived without a calling beforehand, entered the room without knocking at my door and helped himself to food placed in my own refrigerator.
I had a strange feeling. The image reflected in the mirror imitated every of my movement, but it was obviously not me. The image was clear and distinct. I stared carefully into the eyes of the image in front of me. They had the same color of my eyes. But I couldn’t find depth in them, they had no past, they had seen nobody but me. I smiled for a moment ”I have seen more ”- a voice said inside me. I looked at its mouth of the one in front of me, (I was at no rate able to learn to call it ”I”), which only moved when I did so. They had never spoken to anyone else before but me. Maybe it wanted to tell me something, but it still remained silent, because my lips didn’t make any movement. I got angry and my face became frowned. Maybe he was going to tell or warn me something, but … he seemed to try to annoy me. I looked at his face, which was meaningless and pale. It looked like me but it only looked in a way as if it had known me since childhood. I kept looking at it, but after doing so for a long time ever and ever again, I lost myself while trying to find me in him. Suddenly I felt emptiness inside me as if the owner had gone shopping or had taken a long holiday and when he returns he might find some other one lying on the sofa and find the key in the same place where he had left before leaving- under the flower pot on the window sill.
In the morning I woke up later than usual. I wasn’t in bed. I looked up and saw the mirror. I had fallen into sleep with my head leaned against the table. I couldn’t remember anything. There were only two obscure images in my memory- one distorted and another clear. None of them was me. But both of them were there, inside me, where nobody could enter. It was too complicated to behold it as a reality, but at the same time too authentic not to believe it. Again I looked into the mirror, this time the man in front of me smiled at me.
I couldn’t stand any longer and screamed, ” Please stop it. Don’t do that. I myself will break you, me, us…” I got confused, I lost myself afterwards calling him ”Us”, but it was not ”We”… It was me outside, inside, beyond and before the borderline…
I took the mirror and threw it to the ground. Scattered pieces… and nothing more. I felt nothing, nothing happened inside me, I didn’t lose my ego. What is inside you never breaks, what is outside you is far from the farther outside.
The nightmare hadn’t arrived by itself. I myself had given it my address.
It isn’t an unexpected guest. It always comes when we are in need of it. But when we get tired we think we have gone insane. It arrives without making a call beforehand, so that not to disturb you, enters the room, without knocking at the door, so as not to wake you up, helps itself to food opening your own refrigerator so that you don’t give it what you have planned beforehand, but what you have…
Submitted by Mariam Martirosyan
Translated by Shushan Azatyan
Shushan Azatyan's Blog 