Words (shoes)

In order to understand the concept of exhaustion you must replace all the elements in your life with shoes.
You explained this to me:
You are alone in a shoe shop full of customers. Let's say you have 50 different models in the shop. Shoes have to fit. So you have got each model in let's say five sizes. We all want to try at least two different sizes before we make up our mind, so you have to go and look in the stock for every customer who seriously consider a pair of shoes. It's a bit stressful because you then have to leave the shop. You do it of course as fast as you can. But every time you open a box, it's not the right size you find in it, or it's a different model or an unexpected color. None of the shoes fit the boxes. Your customers get impatient, some of them you were just about to sell a pair of shoes leave the shop. Others get angry with you.
You made a little pause.
This is how daily life situations are perceived when we are exhausted.
You took my arm that Saturday and let me out of the shoe shop.

Words (face)

There are faces we loose and faces we never forget.
With oceans and mountains and mammoths between we still carry all the faces we lost. One day we meet our witness and find no defense. There is only one face to wear, the one we once lost. So I kindly ask: when you walk the life and a traffic light turns red, don't look for it. Even if a lost face crosses the street and find your eyes, don't look. Let it pass. Right behind you will meet a man or a woman asking what way to take.

Words (tears)

A cat spied on me today. It didn't give a damn about my tears. Kind of interesting. I wouldn't expect a cow to bother. Nor a lizard. Though the little bird that have moved in and waits for me to open the doors in the morning so it can get in and see if I left her something, I would expect signs of curiosity from her. I can't really bring my tears to a table full of people. But animals. It feels normally good to cry with animals. Some animals, I realize now. The dog has long ago left its position as animal. I never cry in front of her.

Words (sunglasses)

In the bright sun of noon we can't hide, can we? Morningtears settle as salty crystals on cheekbones, thousands and thousands of smiles turn up as fine creeks running away from eyes and it's strange because there is no water in a smile.
At noon we are all naked fish behind sunglasses showing our teeth.

Words (gesture)

With her right arm tied to the body and her right leg fixated in a splint she realized she wouldn't catch any more mosquitoes that summer. The spider upon her head could as well play in her hair and make its nest. That would be her only chance to get the small beasts. She wouldn't call for him because of a mosquito of course. Not for a strange smell in the room either. He would smell it as well if it had something to do with gas, which it hadn't, they didn't have gas cooker. So he probably wouldn't connect any smell with gas.
She focused on the spider.
How many of them had she killed over the years?
This one didn't know about that, did it? It was a fairly big one, active in its web. When she took them with the vacuum she used to imagine them building a new nest in the dust bag. They got a whole village down there. That's why she didn't like the idea of keeping the vacuum in the kitchen. At one point they had to get out of the dust bag and do the migration up through the ribbed pipe. She supposed that was what anyone in front of a pipe would do. If you saw light at the end of something, you would start wandering towards it, no?
So she kept the vacuum in the basement and asked him to get it for her twice a week.
There was no point in thinking about what it would be like in six weeks, five weeks and two days to be precise. What a rat's nest she would find. All the things she couldn't ask him to do. It didn't matter.  She kept saying that to herself. She was lucky,  so many much younger people were killed in the traffic every day.
His steps on the stairs, those big feet approaching the bedroom.
Her girlfriends would once ask what size he was. No one could compete with his ten and a half, she knew that. They would giggle.
They were five, then four and in the end they were just the two of them, her and Heather. They stuck together while waiting for life to begin. Life began the day they got married. Today they were much more independent. Or they pretended to be. Things still changed when people got married, she could tell. She didn't quite understand why they were so ashamed of that. Or why the shame had moved in at her house as well. Not a big, dark shame, certainly not, just enough to make her twist the truth a little sometimes.
He wouldn't correct her. It was like he knew they needed those small corrections. It wasn't good for anybody to hear things about oneself that wasn't true.
Hands didn't have numbers, his were just big, they used to remind her of her fathers, then her grandfather. He had a father's hands from the beginning.
She remembered her granddad's hands very well. The veins, the dark spots, the way they seemed to forget what they held on to.
In snow his boots looked too big for him. That was last year. She did her thing in the kitchen. Now and then she saw him passing between the shed and the lawn and the man was tall and held himself straight. Only the boots seemed to flap around his legs. Those boots were too old anyway.
- So there you are, he said and kissed her forehead.
- Have you seen the spider up there? It keeps dipping its feet in my hair.
He looked at the spider. She looked at it with him.  It seemed smaller now. There were probably two of them, a male and a female, she presumed.
He patted her hand.
- Do you want me to get rid of it?
- It wouldn't help, would it? There will just be another.
He sat by her side in his own thoughts for a while.
- Look, what we can do, he said.
He reached out for one of her pins. Then he took the front of her hair and put it up with the pin, gently, so gently.
- Now you don't get it into your eyes anymore. Better, no?