If I was really so repulsed by the mould and humidity, there’s no way I would be lying around here like this now. I’d get myself up and get out of these sweatpants, which have this stretched-out elastic at the waist so that I need to tie the drawstrings or the pants fall down, I’d take them off and put on some real clothes and go outside.
The alley that leads from our apartment building to the street feels like an accidental gap between the buildings, so narrow you’d have a hard time walking your bike through. There’s one part of the alley that’s concrete because it’s part of the foundation, but most parts of the alley aren’t so when it rains the ground turns to mud and shoes get all muddy. But it’s been sunny the past few days, so the dirt in the alley should be dry and hard.
The street it leads to isn’t much of a street either, only a car-and-a-half wide. It’s closed to oversized vehicles, but they didn’t make it one-way or anything, except for a stretch in the morning when it’s rush hour. I lift my right leg and point my toes, ballet-like, making one straight line. Or I guess I should say that’s what I was trying to do. I can feel the tendons on the outside of my ankle straining.
The narrow street eventually turns into a wider road that’s a slope with two lanes, where the sky isn’t all chopped up by the buildings and you need to use the traffic mirrors because of the curves as you go down the hill. The slope levels off by the station. But you can’t see the station, because there’s a big bookstore in the way, you can only see it once you cross the intersection. The two-lane road goes past the station and continues on for a bit until it joins Sotobori Avenue which keeps going all the way around the moat of the Imperial Palace. There’s a big sign over the avenue there, with fat white arrows on a green background that direct you to the on-ramp for the expressway.
I have the whole day to myself, but no way I’m going to work up the energy to go anywhere. If I did go anywhere, it would probably be the convenience store or somewhere for a coffee, and it’d cost money.
There is a bunch of convenience stores around the station.
I’ve been staring at the ceiling, and the beam running across the middle starts looking like the centre line of a soccer field.
I’d better put in that call to work.
Sometimes when I look at the sign for FamilyMart, with the blue and green stripes, the green part looks beautiful to me (just the green, not the blue). It’s only at a certain time, when the light in the sky is right. Like how I feel about the red of a traffic light when dusk is about to fall and the sky is a little purple. Only thing is I don’t remember at what time of day the light in the sky is right for the green in the FamilyMart sign, except that I’m sure it’s not the beginning of dusk.
The area around my left bicep starts to itch, so I slide my right hand under the sheets and scratch at it through the fabric.
My husband’s arm emerges from the short sleeve of his blue T-shirt, bending at the elbow in a sprawl on top of the white tray on the counter. The elbow has a birthmark, and it comes to a sharp point and looks more grimy to me than the average elbow.
When I yelled at my husband, demanding to know how he could stand to live in such a mouldy-smelling place, it wasn’t because I’m physically unable to stand it, it’s more the fact we have to live somewhere that’s mouldy, but I don’t think he understood where I was coming from. He’s probably still thinking that I’m suffering from the mould smell itself, and if he’s written about it in his blog, even if he didn’t use any names or write enough specifics for someone to figure out who it was about, I think, speaking as someone who was there, I would be able to identify myself from the details, and if he has written about the whole mould-driving-me-crazy business, I’m sure it paints me in a terrible light.
This scenario of mine is now pretty much running on autopilot in my brain. Like maybe he ducked into an internet café for thirty minutes before work last night and wrote it, so that I could find it and read it within a few hours of him writing it. He hadn’t written yesterday or the day before, so he was really feeling like he had to do it, get it written down. Like about me chopping through his controller cord with a knife, and me knowing that I could fly off the handle and destroy his controller and he wouldn’t do anything to me, and even though I knew he loved his video games, I would do it anyway, and how he would say I’m a spoilt brat, only a child would act that way, and how he was surprised by my chopping through his controller cord, but his surprise was quickly taken over by anger, but he didn’t blow up, he just stayed calm, he was trying to vibe me to snap out of it, and then he had this sudden impulse and he slugged me. At least that’s what he would have written, even though in real life he’s never hit me even once. He didn’t even make a sound when I chopped the controller cord, not a peep of surprise or anger, which actually I think made more of an impact on
