Delphine
Copyright 2015 Lee A Jackson
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For time lost he has been surreptitiously watching Delphine. From his detainment in the antechamber beneath the very ground she walks on, he has studied her every move, her every breath. With remorseless resolution he has watched her stumble through her awkward days, but he cannot say why. He has no reasoning for this apparent attraction. He has no explanation. He is just compelled with perverse inclinations, to wallow in this voyeurism which he cannot control, because he is simply no longer in control of himself. He no longer knows the meaning of self-control; it has been lost along with the rest of his life.
He has been banished to this current underground life for reasons he cannot remember. He is lonely, yet he does not know it, does not feel that particular anguish. Maybe some flicker of penury is still burning deep inside the black chasm in his head and that is why his attention never wanes. But he can never say, for his language now has been neglected. This man can no longer speak. He is now mute, because in Hell, the words fall by the wayside when you scream so much internally.
He has forgotten himself. He cannot recognise neither himself nor the person next to him, the one lying dutifully by his side. He doesn’t understand why he watches. He is just a watcher. A chaperone? An insatiable voyeur? An innocent observer? A medley of these, he just watches because his jumbled, contorted muscles instruct him to. He is beneath, contained under the floorboard of her house, where his only view of light is upwards, upwards through the cracks above. Crack through which he can see glimpses of a world which is long foreign to him.
He watches Delphine - so very tall.
Desperately lonely. The words: alone, lonely, forlorn and abandoned are attached to his soul only, not his body. His physical form is not alone, because he has that someone by his side, a someone who shares his depression in this earth under the floorboards.
This other person, the one lying next to him is female, a diaphanous, androgynous soul by his side. Yet he cannot relate to her as being a companion, for his own compassion, like so many nights, has wilted like a dying rose. Yet still he forever holds her close, forever hugs her like a precious child, but why she is here, or who she is, he does not know. He is just running on the most primal, basic of instincts. The comfort of someone else.
Oblivious to reason, he blindly holds the alabaster girl by his side while simultaneously abolishing his mutual bond with her, as fervently he watches above. He looks up through the cracks of the floorboards and with detached mindless gratification, watches Delphine.
He watches Delphine of auburn hair.
Everybody is being watched. Always and forever.
Not everybody knows it.
Delphine doesn’t know. She doesn't know that every time she moves around her house, she treads with piercing stiletto heels, cruelly on the unknown man and woman’s shallow grave beneath her. A grave which has no headstone, no flowers, no visitors - no respect and no love.
Inexorably in-between fits of sleep, for hour after hour he watches Delphine through the cracks above him, studying her with the eyes of a hunter. Waiting for that absolute moment in time in which he can strike clinically and with an overwhelmingly dynamic, uncontrollable lust. A lust for him which is both irrational and arousing.
He watches Delphine of emaciated limbs.
Explanations are distant and whilst his reclusive loneliness plays no part in his quest to utilise the anonymous girl above him, a feral zeal flickers beneath his piercing eyes and this loneliness, above all, shrouds every other unrecognisable emotion within him. Oblivious to him, his loneliness is the claw with which he keeps his focus on the girl above him, mentally protruding it to hook the company of Delphine. Lacking the resources with which to contemplate and categorise his information, his mindless infatuation cannot be dispelled, because, like a flailing hand, Delphine to him, is a perfect synergy.
A synergy from which they both would cower, for it is impossible for two lonely people to be together. Delphine, the supple victim for his talons.
He watches Delphine of tired, emerald eyes.
In solitude too is Delphine. The synergy. Not seeing anything past her pale skin, he knows nothing of the state of Delphine’s own acumen.
But like him, Delphine too is hollow and empty. Reticent to the whole world. Once asked if she ever got fed up with being herself, the only conscience-stricken, truthful answer she could offer was in affirmation.
Delphine found it hard to lie. Why would she have lied in answer anyway? It would not have banished her pitiful situation. She couldn’t hide behind a façade of happiness by offering the simple platitude gesture of a smile, whilst all the time her insides were crying acidic tears, eroding away her spirit.
Yet Delphine finds untold beauty in her blue-world, a private town which some people call Despair, but to Delphine it is home. All the gloriously brutal, harrowing words of her lexicon she can use in this lonely domain, without having to look around her and see sickened faces. This despair swirls around her like blue cotton clouds, perishing away into nothingness.
Delphine recognises that she will always find idle people passing through and caring for her, but no matter how many tourists pass through her life, here in her world below the meridian of the average life, is where Delphine lives. It is where Delphine will always be lonely. So frighteningly lonely.
These people who are concerned for her, are, to Delphine, callous and detached like visitors to a zoo. They only care because they can see this poor, fragile slip of a woman tied and incarcerated in an exit-less cage. She is just an exhibit, a stationary piece of art that disseminates guilt and a mental empathic link to those who gaze upon her. Her company makes them feel sorry for themselves. That is all.
Delphine couldn’t formulate a lie to answer that question with. The only person she lies to constantly is herself. She chronically tells herself that she’ll be happy next time she is with friends, yet sat with them she still feels a million miles from them and their world. She cowers behind stone-cold silence with just her eyes clinging on to rationality by fixing themselves on the faces of those she supposedly loves. Those who are not real friends because there is no such thing. There is only a level of tolerance between two people.
What tolerance there would ever be between Delphine and her unseen watcher is incalculable. At present, they are like kindred spirits with a universe between them.
Delphine listens without ever hearing to what these spectators of her life say, and she only answers when alone inside her mind. So does she get fed up of being Delphine? Herself? She is not sure which person the question was referring to, because she doesn’t know herself who the real Delphine is. The real Delphine. The person no-one sees, the person who is big and strong yet gets buried deep beneath a multitude of rocks and mud in a constant land-slide. Is this the real Delphine, or is the impassive, reticent nobody who sits by the side of these vultures, really her? The apathetic shell is the only person the question knows, so perhaps that’s who she will always be in this milieu.
And fed up? Yes. Fed up of constantly kidding herself that she can be this marvellous, flamboyant company for the world, yet where is this fantastic, mythical person when Delphine needs her?
Happiness is a weakness, a placebo that temporar
ily ostracises pain. Only when the effects wear off does this pain return, twice as bad, prodigious and horrendous.
Of course, the watcher knows none of this. He just sees her sylph form, a mere extension of something which he is. He is unaware of their undeniable symbiosis.
He watches Delphine of pale skin.
He experiences the same solitude which Delphine does, yet he has no means of expressing or comprehending it in the way that Delphine, by the very same loneliness, tortures herself with.
He just watches. Observes. Heedless of all these intrinsic details that could quite easily, invariably envelop him. He gazes upon Delphine whist huddling close to his companion.
He watches Delphine of black-painted nails.
The gaps between the planks of wood are barely more than a couple of millimetres, but still they are reminiscent of bars in a prison cell, which, had his isolation not robbed him of his sanity, he would undoubtedly refer to as his abode. The planks of wood are not joined perfectly side by side, they are like the stars, each a distant neighbour. The planks constitute, despite their fragmentation, to labour as the floor in Delphine’s home.
Lying supine together and joined forever, the watcher and his naked companion, whom he holds tightly, rest in their grave-like niche underneath the wooden sky. Hands joined, bodies naked, each as close as possible to one another, yet distant so.
A dark burrow they are imprisoned in, guardians of a domain that Delphine is unaware that even exists. They are dirty from endless days of feral living, yet he does not notice their deteriorating conditions, and is unable to consider himself gauche.
Through the tiniest network of earth-tunnelled crawl-spaces which he has, he is able to shuffle silently along on his back like a sickening insect, trailing Delphine as she moves around her home.
He only has the slender slivers of light, windows above to the outside world through which to look. But by pressing his eye as close as possible to the floorboards he can see fully into Delphine’s world and the things he cannot touch. The material things, which once he had, now all so immaterial as he has no use for the modern world that his imploding mind has left behind. A time buried forever in a sepulchre deep, deep beneath the world of the living.
He watches Delphine of stomach, flat.
Delphine’s world too is a nightmarish denizen that she cannot escape. She no longer takes her pills, as she realised a long time ago that they too, like friendship were placebo’s that did nothing for her soul. To be truly content she had to look inside herself and crawl above the mountainous black dregs of hopelessness by herself. No medicine could kick-start her into climbing up another rung of happiness. The thought of needing excess stimulation only proved to her how weak a person was, yet her very own mountain peak is still so distant from the vantage-point in her nadir.
Delphine is already weak and constantly fatigued, as well as being alone in the sense that she knows not of her ubiquitous company that resides beneath her. For even when Delphine is not home, her audience’s embryonic thoughts are never far behind her. She cannot escape his eyes. Tired, she sits on the bare floor and draws her knees up to her chin.
He pines when Delphine is not there to be watched.
He watches Delphine of small breasts.
Of the two bodies that lie incarcerated beneath Delphine’s bare feet, only his is animated. His androgynous partner is lifeless. She is aptly interred in this mausoleum under the floorboards. He does not know of her death which passed three days ago. Despite her cold skeletal body and unchanging face, he is unaware that she has been released from her desperate existence and still holds her close. Her eyes remain open, motionless but awake, and these sleepwalking eyes continue to peer at him, comforting, watching him as he looks into Delphine's world above.
All night and day he still clings to this corpse beside him, unable to experience the sweeping, distressing emotions of losing someone close. Now that he has regressed into his current state, his brain gradually leaking away everything that he once had learnt, he does not know who this girl lying next to him is or was. He knows her no better than he knows himself.
Through his reverie he is unaware that once she had been his blooming bride, his one true love. If he were sane he would be in despair, crying, scrambling around inside himself for some tissue to absorb all the pain of losing his beloved. But she has not departed for all he knows. He just recognises her open, staring eyes and believes that she is there today, as yesterday. As forever.
He is serene whereas when her parents died, Delphine was tortured.
Sensing the eyes of his lost bride supporting him, he is allowed to return to his task.
He watches Delphine of dark, burrowing pubic hair.
Delphine has felt the harrowing explosion of the pain of having had kin removed. Her mother and father severed from her like extra umbilical cords, leaving behind visible scarred memories which constantly remind Delphine of those convoluting, dehumanising times.
Delphine feels abandoned and stranded in this big world, alone with no one to cling on to. She has had no companion, friend or lover for nearly two years, instead choosing to keep herself to herself. It’s not as if she enjoys her company, but she knows deep-down that no-one else will either.
She is constantly tired, of life or of herself she is unable to decide. So she just sits naked on the floor in front of a mirror and solemnly buries herself in her twin.
The twin in the mirror has indented white scars on her arms too, just like the ones Delphine put on hers in the hope that the fissures would let the pain and loneliness escape. It never did. It always hid in the deepest, darkest place inside her, never once making itself an available target for assassination. Like a sniper it insidiously kept shooting her down, day after day.
He watches Delphine of self-inflicted scars.
As Delphine tires of her mirrored company, she lies back on the floor and closes her eyes tightly. She tries not to think, but she can’t help thinking about not thinking. Serpentine her mind weaves on.
Delphine’s bare feet are closest to him most of the time, but on occasions, like now; she affords him the pleasure of her back.
The watcher pulls his dead companion closer, as Delphine dies a little more herself into the polished surface of the wooden floor. Delphine’s back comes in contact with the surface, blocking out some of the light to his hovel, yet despite the constant, unfaltering attention from the carcass beside him, even after all those years together which he has now lost, unfaithfully he is transfixed on one person only.
He watches Delphine of skeletal frame.
With muted whimpering of an unloved mongrel, his all-seeing eye focuses upon the darkness above where Delphine is. With slow, deliberate movements he strokes the underside of the wooden planks longingly and compassionately. The surface is rough and uneven on the tips of his fingers. Delphine shouldn’t feel like that. She should be soft, warm, accessible like this person next to him has been for so long. Not cold and harsh as she now is. Briefly he is unable to differentiate between the two, but his eyes are still fixed on the one above.
He watches Delphine of crying mind.
But as he silently mouths his own language, in between hanging his dirty mouth agape, he reaches longingly for the cracks in his ceiling. Repeatedly he traces the tips of his fingers along the gap as far as his reach will allow him, desperate to find a larger crack through which he can reach out a whole hand and touch and embrace Delphine.
He wants to tear apart the bars of his cell and grasp with soiled hands, Delphine’s warm body.
He watches Delphine of empty heart.
He will need someone warm to huddle close to, yet not because of grief. He has unwittingly wanted Delphine in a selfish act of animal infidelity ever since he was thrown into this abyss, but he needs her because she is the only link to a world he once had. A world that has slipped from his memory and faded away like the scraggy corpse lying next to him.
So he lies and watches, watches and wait
s, waits for something but he doesn’t know what.
He has no death to look forward to like Delphine, not even able to envy Delphine for knowing what’s to come.
He watches Delphine....
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