Chapter Text
“OT!”
The way the waves curled from her mouth, shimmered in little circles and strutted over to Otis’ ears made his eardrums thrum with satisfaction. Cruel blatancies accompanying her every piercing word turned euphoric, and the sensation of her attitude, almost clearly perceptible, mellowed down. The thud of her teeth sent magnetic ripples to her lower lip, in his daze, he was aware that he had missed a majority of what she was saying. She had stopped speaking.
It was all gone.
It was all still there.
It might have started right then and there: hot pink trousers clung to delicate legs, a modest top sat crooked over her chest, leaving more than just a touch of skin bare. As Otis observed the panorama approaching him, his eyes had to double over twice to capture every tap of her heel and scrape of her toes. As she sauntered towards him, a rhyme danced at the horizon but proved to be excruciatingly out of his reach.
“You don’t look entirely bad,” Ruby began, coming to an immediate halt adjacent to Otis. Her lips reached up to his neck, and he lowered it in anticipation, catching nothing but a hint of tongue and a blissful chuckle.
“How was your day?” asked Otis, transfixed by the layers of muscle starting from Ruby’s stomach and descending ever lower. Otis’ eyes followed the seemingly blithe muscles on their journey, as they originated from just below the ending of her top, cascaded downwards in crooked stripes, widened to make way for her navel, until they got swallowed by the pink trousers, causing nothing but agony.
“What’s this?” Ruby reached over and caught a strand of hair protruding from his left eyebrow. Otis expectantly pushed his face forward but was regarded with rolling eyes and flickering eyelids.
“I thought I explicitly told you to trim it?”
“I just forgot.”
Ruby nodded. He saw a glimpse of sunshine in the unrelenting stream of her eyeliner, a glint of warmth, extinguished as soon as it was exuded. Otis lowered his eyes to the omnipresent patterns of the floor which seemed to follow him around everywhere these days, and in which he often took solace, stealing a moment of comfort and self-reflection here and there. He didn’t meet Ruby’s expecting eyes, and continued staring at the inscrutable and disarrayed patterns, trying to discern a glint of simplicity in their arrangement, no matter how miniscule, that he could use as a key to unscramble them, to organise them into neat little boxes to aid himself in fleshing out the meaning behind them.
Otis fished his phone from his pocket and plugged in his earphones to mitigate the tedium of the patterns. He closed his eyes, and let the lyrics of his favourite song occupy his mind.
♪ Tell me a line, make it easy for me. Open your arms. Dance with me until I feel alright ♪
Ruby smiled bright, brighter than she should have, brighter than what he was capable of deciphering. Otis couldn’t bring his eyes up in time to witness the smile, but brought them up fast enough to catch the lingering twinkle that Ruby’s smile always seemed to leave in its surroundings.
♪ It's good in the dark. Good in the dark ♪
Unaware of any reaction from Ruby, Otis started walking towards his bicycle. She had refused to accommodate him in her car because of the shabbiness of his five-year old parka, and his household, brown trousers. He wanted to yell and highlight to her the exasperating ways in which her argument about Otis’ harrowing sense of fashion was merely a reflection of a faux Western ideal of preserving the vogue in the pursuit of the sustenance of a collective identity. He wanted to sit her down and explain to her all the ways the claims about collective identity as a benevolent ideal were pathologically incorrect. Yet, being privy with Ruby’s ways came with a snag, and he knew that as soon as he even thought of doing something like that, the probability of him getting shot down would exponentially increase.
♪ But into the lover's light. Here comes another fight ♪
He had managed to walk a few steps away when he felt nimble fingers interlock with his own. He gave Ruby, who had managed to catch up with him, a sideward glance and continued walking wordlessly.
♪ So ring the alarm, ring the alarm. Bar me and hold me and cling to my arm ♪
Feeling a prick on his side, he leaned backwards and witnessed Ruby throw half of her weight onto his arm. He snaked his other hand into his pocket. He moved his arm slightly, his frantic fingers looking for something to grab, something to preserve.
♪ And what you're asking me now. Disastrous now. Hoping and hoping, and hoping. The feeling goes away ♪
She tilted her head to look at him while he carried both of their weight, his gaze unflinchingly narrow, unwilling, unable to meet the intensity of her eyes. After a few minutes of moving her eyes in search of his, frantically reaching for anything she could grab, anything she could save, she closed them, and eased some of her weight off him to make it easier for him to walk.
♪ Never change, never change. Never change, never change. Never change, never change. Never change, this is why I fell in love, oh ♪
Upon reaching his bike, Otis tugged his arm away from under Ruby’s head to support his bike off from its stand. He thought he felt something graze his eyebrows but he didn’t turn. When he turned around, he turned around just in time to steal a glimpse of her hair as it whipped away from him and accompanied her away, without a word, boisterously.
♪ Never change, never change. Never change, never change. Never change, never change. Never change, that's just who I fell in love with ♪
As she flourished her hair in a deliberate fashion, the nethers of it managed to find the small curls of his eyebrows. She waited and waited, and at last, turned around and walked away. The glisten of her lenses reflected in her something she had sought ever since she was little, which she felt was now retreating. Why was this, she wondered. Was it because he didn’t sigh and close his eyes when he felt the gentle brush of her hair on his eyebrows? Or was it because he didn’t bring his filmy wrist up to catch the strand of hair, to flourish it and trace its length with his delicate fingers until the texture had been ingrained into his brain?
Halfway to her car, she turned around, but saw the empty stand which in the mornings acted as refuge for Otis’ precious bicycle. She felt her eyes crinkle up, she leaped the distance to her car, afraid that someone would catch her in this state. With a last glance behind, she clutched her purse, blew in and ducked into the driver’s seat.
It was all gone.
It was all still there.
Ruby sat by the window in her modest room, with lights switched off and nothing but a camphor fuelled lamp in front of her and an open window, which seldom granted her the solace of fluttering wind. On the walls was a taped poster, within which preserved were the most evocative fragments of her personality; fragments which she had long dispersed, only ever to be sought in isolation. Each flutter of the poster had the agency to bring back the most fatuous and juvenile of her fancies, the most cordial and heartfelt of her choices.
The flicker of the solitary lamp incidentally lighted up the portion of her face that she felt most comfortable with brandishing to the light, while the other half, long forced to bear the brunt of her cascading emotions and turbulent sentiments, was agreeably concealed. Stunted glow casted bizarre shadows on the adjacent wall and devoured any rival reflection, becoming a remnant of an identity long foregone.
This was a still night, the open window relinquished not enough energy to cool the creases of her skin with motion, the heat-distilled camphor lamp generated not enough motion to make her skin shiver with sweat, the miniscule levels of sweat generated not enough activity to launch her thoughts into motion, her thoughts generated not enough sobriety to restrain their motion, the motion generated not enough potential to constrain her tumbling emotions.
It was difficult to believe that the boy she was dating was impervious to the clearly evident signs she exuded, and in the light of the events of this day, Ruby thought about what she would say to him when she saw him next. She began to verbalise words that only he would understand, cosmopolitan babble, syllables that stayed just between the two of them, were meant just for the two of them, defiling any and all bounds of structure, leaping forward from the confines of language and thudding against her lips like glazed ember. Privy to each punctuation, she let the intricacies roll off with each wave of her tongue, numerous tumbling consonants at the back of her throat begged to be casted forward, several of these casted forward slipped off the tip, the opening vowel visualised and finally determined were the first syllables that she would utter.
Otis alone wasn’t the subject of her love, rather it was the blank image his existence offered, a perfectly white canvas upon which she strove to preserve not just the illusion of herself, or his illusion of her, her illusion of his, rather the harmonious whole that she had envisioned with not any parts of herself and him, with every parts of him and herself, a reflection of not just them, a reflection of their reality, each element overpowered by its entirety, each entirety underwhelmed by its element.
She witnessed the sturdy walls of sensation and passion within which she had constructed a quiet world for herself and Otis becoming fragmented, the pieces being scattered excruciatingly out of her reach. His indifference itself could be tolerated, outlived, but the realizations that accompanied that indifference were what introduced the most melancholic crossroads in her life.
Amidst domestic fiascos, caring for a father whose only recourse from M.S. seemed to be weed and who would much rather lather himself and his lungs with smoke until solitary drops of tar were the only thing that kept them afloat than submit to the scorching will of his crippling conscience, and navigating the confines of time her mother subjected her to whenever she worked overtime, Ruby had come to cherish the ephemeral moments of comfort and relief that accompanied Otis’ presence. And to see the prospect of these moments maturing struggling to keep up with the snags in their relationship engendered the prospect of exerting more attention and regard than was strictly necessary in public towards him. And to see the prospect of these moments not being able to keep up with the snags in their relationship made Ruby shudder.
The answer to all her complications was well in front of her but she had assumed a stance of almost obstinate resolution, yet all she had to do was bring her lips high enough to Otis’ in public more than once, establishing a twisted pattern with the intention to dumbfound every soul that lays eyes on the spectacle. This unwillingness however was no indication of a lack of love, rather it was the conception of a threat to her indulgence in baroquish desires, desires that she had employed all her energy and time into securing for herself, the products of constant vigilance, of insistent bitchery, that made her retract her thoughts and take a second to exhale.
She sustained maintaining a social equilibrium of importunate proportions concerning her behaviour in her household against that in school, which allowed her to balance out the spectrum of the eclectic desires and impulses that were at the fibre of her personality, no one eccentricity vanquished the customary, the unvanquished customary prompting not enough usuality to conquer the idiosyncratic, the idiosyncratic generated not enough exceptionality to outweigh the conventional, the fragments fabricating the whole, the whole predicated on the fragments.
She stretched her arms out lavishly around her waist, and torqued her back to face the window. The two buildings that had been constructed a couple of metres adjacent to her house were clearly visible, the peak of both of them shimmered catching the reflection of the stars overhead. While the first building towered over the second, rendering the second nothing but an almost indecipherable mass, the smaller building glowed brighter. Maybe it was just Ruby’s scrutinising eyes that cluttered the proportion but the realisation that if Ruby just decided to focus all of her attention on the taller tower, the second one will lose its glamour, filled her with acute bouts of restlessness that flared up everytime she glanced at the taller building.
The almost edifical quality of the smaller building ensured that the solitary protruding crevice of its peak touched its neighbour. There was something in the touch of the two buildings that reminded Ruby of the marvel of human touch. There was something in delicate touch that Ruby had always enjoyed, apart from sex, of which suffice to say she had indulged in more than her fair share, which fuelled the need in her to brush the edges of her arm with Otis’ frequently, but not frequently enough to direct his attention to it. There was something about delicate touches, silky brushes that cut deep and wrung the chords of her heart around itself, that pierced through the indelectable channels of faux urbanity behind which hid the profundity of her undisplayable emotions, the sagacity of which was enough to chain even an ungirdled mind like Ruby’s to the liquorish realm of diffidence.
Amongst a bouquet of sighs and the tranquil strikes of hale, clutching herself in a vice-like grip, Ruby looked like a character out of a blemished allegory, with the only constant being her cascading thoughts. And it was within the beginning of the raindrops sheathing their cleavers and the sombre thrum of her lamenting heart that Ruby found herself lost to sleep.