Portraits of TwentySomethings: The Spark

She woke up with a start. She felt the summer heat creeping onto her face that was now blotched with make-up from yesterday. The first rays of sunlight were streaming in through the balcony. Had she slept at all or had she really been in a state of reverie for the last four hours?

She felt exhausted. She pulled away the starch-white bed cover and sat on the edge of the bed. The carpeted floor seemed to beckon to her earnestly. She wanted to collapse on the ground, lie flat and then wait for the rest of the room to dissolve into the blots of colours she saw that night when she was intoxicated with psilocybin mushroom.

And finally she thought they should just all vanish together.

She closed her eyes for three seconds. She straightened her back with dignity, and as crazy as it might sound, hoping that the straightness would somehow make everything right again.

She opened her eyes.

Nope, nothing has changed. This is fucking real.

She stood up and started picking up and putting on her clothes strewn around the room piece by piece in an almost robotic fashion. A gust of wind slapped her face. She was glad it did.

Slap me a few more times.

She walked to the door. Is that door her escape or a trap? She couldn’t tell anymore. She turned back and took a long and

meaningful glance at the man. She could finally see his face again. Perhaps there were a few moments in the last four hours when she could feel every ounce of the energy radiating from his body, count every pore on his face, smell the bittersweet, stale fragrance of the cigarette lingering in his ash-brown hair. Yet when she opened her eyes, still on his bed, she felt nothing but the emptiness that wrapped tightly around her little lithe body. His back was facing her. He was about eight inches away then. She had wanted to reach out to him.

Now she felt like she was overlooking this entire scene like a tourist and he was the citadel standing on the hill in Vilnius or another ancient city, just some slabs of rocks stacked on each other. Irrelevant and far away, like a tiny peck on a panoramic photo taken from an even taller tower in the city. Been there done that and crossed off from the itinerary, she heard the voice of a tourist who had ambitiously conquered every attraction. The following day, the tourist would feel the ache in his calves and the fatigue taking over his body from the day of scaling the hill. You almost always feel something after.

What am I feeling?

The silence was too hard for her to bear. She closed the door behind her. 

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Portraits of TwentySomethings is a series that capture the dilemmas, struggles and dreams of the TwentySomethings whom the curator believes have the flow and are courageous to choose the pain in a bid to achieve their dreams. They are pretty much (amazing) work-in-progress. 

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