Ran Meng


Quotidian Consciousness, a Valentine to Lingering

I am in a screen, and all else is silent. The moment is my moment.

(Playback start)

Press the remote and we start the journey a bit back in time. The frame then being an unmemorable month and conspicuously murkier when days and days heap upon the start of this recollection but tomorrow becomes more tomorrows.   Haven't had eggs in months, skin sort of cut like the undesirable tomato hanging itself in the pot. The egg's skin gets left behind when one cracks the shell, poor chicks unborn. Poor children, the unborn, what words lost in the span of coming eternity…   Drown quickly before we tear up, you unborn and I standing here. The pan is your quicksand. Farewell raw friend. A hymn for you is there, I will sing it.  

Some few (or many) moments ago the sky was blowing the smoke sideways, emanating from the left sector of geometry. Skewed and quirky imagery; seen through the steps taken down the land into the urban caves hoarding their glass, glitter, metal and absence of true laughter. Confused, stuffy smells hang around like greedy hunger for food. Drum-like rhythms these women have when their shoes clatter on the ground of stone. Miles of them descend into the underground metro to embrace their absent lovers lingering on the subway trains. They march to that frenzy.   Drudgery, a maid, a scullion maid peeling potatoes as I fry the unborn, cut skin, and end nonexistent words. Never said three times is not plagiarism.  

Press button, some moments earlier in the cafe, the light was drawn at intersecting shades of shadow. All old men are versions of each other, rain-coat, umbrellas, briefcases, and a newspaper. Subtract one, replace one, re order the list but what's there is there. British history beside me, I've got a question about Anne Askew, or maybe Anne Boleyn. Silence is more convenient, afraid I am…too afraid of intervention in their moments absorbed in a book. At night, at day their days are alive but in this suspending moment life is only support.  

Modern life passes through the span of avoidances and thus I am right. Glee, there is glee! She was glad (the woman in the store), I got the dog. She was glad, I got the dog. It being woeful, woeful it was. Take account of all the woeful ones, take into. Take under the umbrella in a storm. I'll have it. All the old men will sit with me under their umbrellas and read their newspapers, read their books and our thoughts will run parallel and never intersect, while the shadows do their playing.  

The architecture building, two hours earlier became you. It engulfed me when I hit upon the notion and I caved in like my beams were taken apart. The same way here, walked so many times. Where are my heels so I may march to my own drum, my heart to seek that lingering lover? To seek the bitter frost of unrequitation (pseudo in nature) that burns in the breast. What lofty canvas the mind paints the portrait of the object paints on is not so lofty at all. Wherein the object measures million of miles that the sounds are lost upon my ears and the eyes are lost as well in the beholder of the vision. Images and images, if you are a building and I am skeletal beams then both of us may be taken apart.  

These thoughts that run on tracks leading to you, they trace themselves to sometime indefinite (before us). You won't leave me. I'm too…I'm too unmade. Undressed, but flower-like...and not falling to die and fade upon cold concrete. Happiness is a veil like sleep, like dreams, that crossover unwittingly for humanity.  

There's an anchor (you?), anchor to searching at night. A boat, sailing - sailing away across the sea of blackness. No candles at night, no lights, no stars, no moon - emptiness. A void, a well so deep - the water at the bottom so stagnant like life unlived for so long...I am almost certain the purpose is to mend my heels.

Ran Meng lives in Montreal, Canada and is a biochemistry major at McGill University where he is also working on a minor in English literature. Plum Ruby Review is his first publication.