Light. #3
She retained that ever-so elegant casual air, even in spite of her overt disturbance. She looked jaundiced now: her previous grey shading making way for a yellow accentuated by the warm cast of thirty-pence lightbulbs. Lock shattered; door splintered: her mood was made instantly explicable by the drama played out by her surroundings.
“Wha… what’s happened?”
Of course, my lack of aptitude in the perception of the painfully obvious had not failed me here: it was startlingly apparent that her flat had been broken into; her drawers rummaged through; and her belongings strewn everywhere, latching onto whatever would catch them. Jumpers on the hung paintings, coatstand and ridiculously oversized television; one pair of jeans on the bedpost and several others strewn across the floor with a perceptible lack of care; but the underwear was far more orderly in its relocation. That isn’t to say that it was neatly laid out in folded piles, but there was far more to it than the pseudo-random launching of clothing in all directions. It was just women’s clothes; women’s clothes following what could almost be diffusion patterns, with not concentration being the factor in where everything moved to, but rather the proximity of pieces of clothing to genitalia: it was the vandalism of the sexually frustrated.
This seemed… familiar. Memories came back to me. This reminded me of myself: a focus on the clothes, with a certain care paid to the more personal of garments. He was undressing her with clothes off to begin with: the clothes which come off first had been flung furthest. Could it be that I had someone close to my heart to close to my home?
“What do you think happened? Someone’s broken into my home and destroyed any sense of order which I had in my fetid homestead.”
Taking into account her complete and utter lack of understanding of (or will to use) colloquialisms, English being an unfortunate second language in her eyes, she sounded quite impassioned and somewhat annoyed at my question.
“Is anything missing?”
“Well, no; but that’s not the point.”
“Don’t fret. I’ll fix your door and you can get to getting things back in order.”
She hadn’t noticed. She hadn’t noticed the order to her chaos: I may still have the chance of finding a new playmate, if not a protegé voyeur if the sloppiness of this operation was anything proportional to his inexperience in his, our art.
Woodworking never was a strength of mine, so the concept of any repair of the door was out of the question; but the drive to Focus for a new door and lock was more than enough of an excuse to contemplate what had happened and what it meant for me: if I was right, I was no longer alone. I no longer had to hide my more socially reprehensible act. I no longer had to act alone: I could gain an enabler in my activities; someone to facilitiate and inspire me. The premature yet inevitable splintering of rotting lignin and cellulose had afforded me such a possibility in opportunity.
This was not down to chance: this was down to some wonderful, divine cause.