The waiting room

Reaching out, I turned the knob to the right and pulled the door open. There was another room inside, a significantly sized room that to my bewilderment, was already lit. I pulled the key from the lock and pocketed both it and the book, then shimmied into the room and stood up.

Dumbfounded, I stared around the room which was lit by a peachy pink light coming from several frosted lamps on low, ornately carved wooden tables. The room had a low ceiling, which like the walls was painted in a warm salmon pinkish color. Rich, burgundy red carpet stretched across the floor that was littered with more strange board games, bizarre toys, and books. Several low cushioned seats that looked like ottomans were placed here and there by the tables. On the left facing wall was a recess with a carpeted seat that was bordered by deep burgundy red curtains. On the right wall was a very large full length mirror which was also framed with curtains.

The room was utterly inviting and contained a palpable air of welcome and....well, joy is the best way to describe it. Nonetheless, I couldn't quite get past the shock of how this room even existed- in my closet- and who the bloody hell had left the lights on all this time!

I stepped further into the center of the room and turned around slack jawed in amazement. In my revolution, however, I noticed something very disquieting. The door that I had just previously passed through was gone.

I strode quickly to the wall in the direction I had entered and felt along it where the door SHOULD have had the sense to be. Not a seam, not a trace that it had ever been there. I knocked against the wall in hopes that perhaps I could detect the apparently "secret" passage I had come through, but to no avail. I stepped back, and noted that the wall was covered with painted murals of colorful mermaids. Mermaids were certainly lovely, but where was the blasted door?

Lots of things go through one's head when one is seemingly locked in a room that technically didn't exist before and likely shouldn't be at all. Such as "What bloody architect forgot to install necessities such as windows? Or a bathroom? Or a DOOR OUT?!!" And then, other things like "Oh hell, I'm stuck in here in my pajamas. How brilliant." Or "Alright. I'm dreaming. I got so tired that I have just fallen asleep on my bed and the whole closet incident is a dream. Right!"

I must say, it's quite difficult to wake up from something that isn't really a dream, even if it feels like one.

Feeling conflicted by the abject comfort of the room and the desire to leave it, I did the only thing one can do whilst wearing flowered pajamas and sat on one of the low cushioned seats surrounded by a pile of toys and games. My doubt was severe, but perhaps somewhere in this room there was a passage elsewhere and it might just be laying about amidst all the colorful distractions.

Distractions, they certainly were. All manner of boxes in flaming colors, decks of playing cards, bizarre games that I had never seen before with oddly shaped pieces. Hand-held electronic games that beeped and spewed numbers and words and shapes onto their screens. Impossibly colored baubles, jewels, necklaces, old coins. The more I looked through the piles, the more things seemed to appear, each as fascinating as the last. I nearly forgot my predicament until I decided to shuffle through a deck of cards I had found in a lacquered wooden box. I remembered that I had left the strange deck of cards that had come with the book and keys back in the top of my closet. I muttered a few curse words, and then started to worry. What if those cards were important somehow. What if I had left the only way to get out of this room OUTSIDE of the room?!

I got up and walked about, trying to calm myself. Deciding that the recessed seat looked inviting enough I sat down on it amongst the plushy tasseled pillows and removed from my pockets the items I did bring along- the book and keys. Funny, how the keys were all separate in my pocket now. I flipped through the book again, half expecting to find that some sort of instructions had magically appeared. It was still blank, but there was a card marking a page about halfway through. I pulled it out- it looked like the same style as the cards I had left behind.

"The Royal City?" The lettering was a deep purple. The card looked old but the colors printed on it were still bright. A picture of a fancy crown and an even fancier coat of arms was displayed above the title. The back of the card was blank and brownish, except for an ornate printer's ornament in the center.

Unsure what to make of all this, I stared ahead, flipping the card over in my hand and staring into the mirror opposite me.

Closeted Insomniac

Where was I?

Winter, cadavers and obits, yes.

That was life day in and out for quite some time. It had a certain rhythm. Rather like a tone deaf tuba player in an orchestra of broken kazoos and a rusty triangle, but a rhythm nonetheless.
As someone who had felt like they had settled for what was available, or more accurately become complacent -if not jaded -about life, I found little in the day to day happenings terribly interesting or cheering. I also suffered from severe cabin fever and lingering insomnia.

You'd think that growing up in the arctic wastes of Finland during the winter would make me a hearty person. Hardly. I despise the season. Cold, unyielding - a bit warmer in the more temperate area of Britain, but still unpleasant to my taste. The only contribution that having Finnish blood has given me is a complexion that, like the moon, reflects a large quantity of sunlight. And there's my tolerance for drink. Perhaps that's the Irish portion of me....

Anyhow.....winter made me feel trapped and closed in too much with myself. I found that I wanted to sleep more, although I had trouble doing so. Insomnia is best described by a tarot card I've seen- the 9 of swords I believe, with a person in bed lamenting and nine swords in the air above them. The picture is a representation of the churning thoughts, worries and unsettled business that one allows to keep them awake at night. That sort of thing I had in plenty.

My insomnia took the form of being unable to fall asleep, as opposed to waking up in the middle of the night and being unable to drop off again. I'd been up and down the list of remedies like a squirrel in a tree. Baths, tea, more tea, cheese, darkness, boring books, mantras, etc.
More often than not, I wound up just getting out of bed and attempting to make use of my unwanted wakefulness.

On one of those many chilly winter nights (the flat was bloody drafty) I had been tossing and turning for well over two hours with no respite. Angry, although slightly out of sorts from the attempts at sleep, I threw the covers aside and flung my pillows as the closet door. I then discovered I was damn cold. After putting on an extra pair of socks (orange and blue stripes), I repaired the covers on my bed and went to the closet to pull down some more blankets.

I reached up to the top shelf where the stacks of blankets were and pulled down a fuzzy blue blanket, also a thick down comforter with strawberries all over it. I arranged these in my pile on the bed the way a hamster arranges shredded paper and then went to close the closet door. I stopped in my tracks however, when I saw something rather odd on the shelf where the blankets had been.

It looked like some sort of board game, old but still retaining its faded color. I couldn't recall storing the thing there, but then again I am capable of forgetting what I am doing in the middle of the doing. I went for a stool to stand on to get a closer look, as the box was pushed far back on the shelf. Now eye level with the box, I pulled it forward. There was no writing on it. Just a red cardboard box with florid yellow, green and purple decorations on it. How odd. I still had no recollection of it. It was possible that this could have been one of those oddities I picked up along the way at a flea market or some-such and left it neglected up here. I opened it and found a small leather-bound book, some odd picture cards in a deck, and three keys, each with a different colored ribbon tied to them (once again, yellow, green, and purple).

I opened the book- it was utterly blank, but had very soft pages and a nice feeling brown cover. The picture cards were brightly illustrated but bizarre, reminding me slightly of tarot in their imagery although I was not aware of what they could possibly be for. The keys were large- as long as my palm (alright, my hands are bloody small, but they were large to me) and made of brass. I was turning the one with the purple ribbon over in my hand when I looked up on the closet shelf in thought- and an odd knob protruding out from the wall at the back of the shelf caught my eye.

Why was there a knob on my wall?! I cleared away some other bedding items nearby so I could get a better look, and snapped on a light switch above my head. (Had I always had a light switch there? You live in a flat for several years and you forget silly details like that I suppose) The shelf was lit up with a soft pink light. The knob on the back wall was white porcelain, antique looking, and had...it had a blasted keyhole beneath it! I was staring at a small door in the back of my closet wall on the shelf. I tried to reach forward to touch it, but couldn't get a good angle so I hoisted myself forward, up and onto the shelf. Crawling forward a bit I found I was able to sit up fairly comfortably on the shelf itself. (my, I wish I'd appreciated how roomy this closet was before!)

I pulled at the knob- the small door was locked. The door itself was just large enough for a small to average size person to crawl through. Maybe this was one of those secret-attic-crawlspace passages that you find in older buildings. I know my mum and dad had something like this in their closet back home. I reached back to the box for the keys I had found. It would be ironic for someone to put a silly box with silly keys up near a tiny secret doorway in your bloody closet if one of the keys didn't open the door somehow. Actually, it would be more mean spirited then ironic, in my opinion.

I tried each of the keys, and none of them worked. They were all too small and not shaped properly for the keyhole (which was rather bizarrely designed, might I add.) "Well, how brilliant you mean spirited leaver of useless keys. Nice going." I toyed angrily with them for a bit, muttering to myself until I noticed how oddly shaped the keys were. They all had strange grooves and bent parts that normal keys don't. It was when I looked at them with the teeth pointing towards my eye that I realized why they were formed so peculiarly.

Noting where the grooves and slots and bends were, I turned the purple key and tried to fit it against the green in several different positions. They seemed to fit somewhat, but it was apparent to me that I needed the yellow key to hopefully lock them together- like a puzzle. I took the yellow key and slid it into place with a soft click. The result was more three dimensional than the average key, and I could see as I approached the keyhole this time that this arrangement was the way it was intended to fit.

The key slid effortlessly into the lock and turned with a hearty click.

A requiem for winter

There are people who speak of "normal" as a desirable quality in persons and in life.

Bugger those folk.

Normal is a far cry from real or healthy, or interesting. Normal is a facade, a sad, wet, cardboard facade that slowly disintegrates under pressure. Not at all durable.
I've found, that the more one thinks that one's life is normal, the more nature abhors the perceived vacuum and throws not only a monkey wrench, but a power drill, a disc sander and a welding crew at them.

I was a writer of obituaries. You know, those little sketches that go something like this:

Spebbington-Mrs. Arthur Stewart (in that charmingly antiquated style of being a marital accoutrement)

Hortense Margaret Spebbington (nee Ormsby) 94, of Leeds. Preceded in death by husband which was fortunate because his snoring was driving the neighbors batty. She loved going to church (for the bake sales), knitting incessantly and providing her family with all manner of frightening scarves, horridly patterned sweaters, tissue box cozies, and booties for the cat(s). Sadly the requests to cease went unheard. She was also fond of needlepoint and cross stitch, and many family members received framed versions of her work which featured old hackneyed phrases- often accompanied by an obscene representation of bears masquerading as some other animal. Hortense also enjoyed bingo, chain smoking, nagging and decorating her house with chickens. Survived by daughters, Paige, Prudence, Polly and Patricia, sons Paul, Peter and Hogarth III. (the oops baby) Also survived by a teeming mass of cherubic grandchildren who love slobbery denture kisses and cheek pinching only long enough to get their grubby little hands on grannies fresh baked cookies (ahem, church bake sale). She was a godly woman who did everything right and smiled so hard it hurt, even when she wanted to wallop the snot out of you for breaking her godawful clown figurines. (on purpose. the things are scary.) She is now a beautiful angel in heaven, looking down on all the other relatives who never bothered to visit her because she chased them away with a broom when they tried. May she rest in peace.

.....Charmed life, isn't it?
You could say the same for mine, with less bingo and knitting of course.

So, yes. obits. Cracking good times.
And naturally, as death tends to spike in the winter months, legions of grannies, old stodgy war heroes, and other folk pop off because no one really likes to hang about in the cold, wet nastiness that follows the holidays.

Least of all me. Winter is a punishment....rather like an unwanted house guest. The relative that you really can't stand, but let them stay anyhow even though you know they're going to kindle that familiar homicidal feeling in less than a day. And then they stay too long, rearranging your pantry, fixing things that aren't broken, eating the slice of cheesecake that you had saved for yourself. No manner of politeness ousts them. Worst of all, they are apparently blind to your sufferings and do not seem to understand that co-opting the tele and watching the weather channel for hours on end makes you want to gouge their eyes out with a melon-baller. And they don't get the hint that you want them to leave. Even if you tell them.

Yes, that's winter. But I digress....

Where was I headed with this? Oh yes. Normal.
Well, for most people writing obits in the heart of winter wouldn't be normal but it was everyday for me. Tiring, depressing, often boring.

It's hard to focus on one's own life in a positive way when everything around you decides to curl up its toes and die. Like a big parade always headed for the exit, and with the constancy of dishes needing done everyday. Death Death Death. Hooray.

What I mean to describe in further chapters however, is how the perceived normal, the flow of dead people and write-ups and cold breezes changed without a warning. Not even a morsel of warning.

...And I would love to do that right now, but I must immediately remove the pot from the stove unless I would like to enjoy the charcoal flavor in my breakfast.

Bother.