My ramblings....

A Fanfare For The Mundane

There are a few times a year when I face the immediately serious problem of an eyelash stuck on some unreachable surface of my eye.

Generally, my initial response is to first try to remove it by force, but often it's hidden under the lid, thus making the removal nearly impossible "blind". I then begin to panic, desperately wiping and clasping my eye and hoping the retina does not get scratched and wondering when the painful irritation will ever ease. I then recall my body's natural defenses, I calm, blinking rapidly as my eyes soon wet and pool and the lash is brought slowly and softly to the front of the eye, which is no longer in distress at the foreign presence, but protected by silky shallows.
Only then, I proceed to the nearest mirror and easily remove the lash, the entire ordeal quickly dissipates with the clearing of my red eyes.

There is one extraneous thought, though, that I have discovered makes an appearance every time I carry out this minute upset of everyday life. It doesn't take any prompting or recalling, it just appears now, as naturally as though it holds the hand of whatever lash should have caused such trouble in the first place.

It is a memory from at least ten years ago, I'm sitting in the backseat of the car belonging to my friend E (or more correctly, her family). She's in the backseat too, and her mom is driving, we're maybe eight or nine.
I can remember exactly where we were at the moment that the bulk of the memory happens. We must have been coming from E's house, because we were going along the main road from the direction I now know was east, instead of from the entrance at the west which my family most normally would have travelled. The road is bordered by trees and quaint military houses.

Her mother comments that she has something in her eye, she is rubbing it and quickly enters the panic stage, saying, "I need to pull over" I laugh a little because of the drastic reaction to one small eyelash, and E turns to me and says angrily, "Don't laugh! She might not have been able to see and could have gotten into a car crash!"
And that's where the memory stops. I don't know how long it took for her mother to finally remove the lash or what else E said or where we ended up...

The only thing that immediately follows this memory is the image of a fact, like a broadcast news flash, that a few years later E's mother has died.

She had been scrubbing a floor
(dark marble in a large empty room, she, right in the middle)
With high grade cleaning products
(white spray bottles, yellow and black labels, a red pail to her front, not blocking her figure which is leaning forwards on hands and knees)
Some of which enters an open cut
(on her knee, as her hands are covered with long yellow gloves)
Leading to a blood clot
(the poison shoots up through her veins, entering straight into the heart with the force and precision of arrows)
Which is the ultimate cause of her unusual death
(she falls to the side, clearly missing the wet surface she has just scrubbed, and in the emptiness of the room she, her face serene, quietly disappears)

And these, the memory and thought, which without fanfare slip in and out of my mind three times a year for the past ten, when a lash makes an unwelcome visit to the white. Perhaps it was a moment that marked an 'ending of childhood' or something of the sort. A distinction, disruption, a sudden misfiring or connection. Maybe it's just the repetition that comes from Pavlovian programming. It could be that my adolescent self suddenly noticed something of the fragility of state, or non-sensical selection, or the futility in panic.
Because, people will always disappear.

posted by Unknown @ 7:50 AM