Pressed between the pages of her old diary, she kept a flower hidden. It wasn’t special in any way, just one she picked when she was a child in her grandmothers back garden. All these years she had kept it safe in the diaries that followed. Always there, she grew up, left for university, got married, had children. Grandchildren. And now when her crooked fingers no longer can hold a pen, it is still there, like a little delicate time machine, giving evidence that there indeed was a time when she was a child, picking the flower with chubby fingers.
It started ever so slowly, with just a few tropical plants self seeding on the immaculate lawn. Like a subtle precursor of what was to come, of her world crumbling and the empire ending, they slowly spread. Quietly she stood by the window in her once magnificent, white colonial manor, turned black from the heat of the tropic, looking out, with her clothes in rags, resembling jungle lianas more than a cool evening dress. Once the strong, the ruler yet now defeated, she stood still, in the last inhabitable room, looking through the broken window and wondered how this happened.
Hunched over her keyboard while the night closed outside the window of her attic flat, she hammered the keys to kill the deafening silence around her. It was a noise that brought her company, like a trusted friend that distracts from a relentless life. Page after page of rambling words, spreading on the screen like climbing poison ivy, incoherent but at least giving alibi of an existence. The moon though, would not be fooled; it found its way through her closed curtains, like a carefully placed interrogation light, demanding to know “what have you done with the life given you?”
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October 2015
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