Chapter Two
I remember receiving a few letters from the electricity company informing me that my account was overdue. I also remember writing several cheques made out to the electricity company for sums of various amounts, perhaps similar, if not the same as what was owed to them. However, it easily could have been something else.
I was still in the living room standing in near darkness, so I reached over to the nearest switch and to my surprise the room was filled with translucent life!
To where a light-shade should be found, there was not, and it took my besieged hazel-green eyes an unaccountable few moments to adjust to their most wondrous best, although not wondrous at all; well they used to be a long time ago, now they feel old, sluggish and defective.
I took one final glance at the picture which had ignited my idiosyncrasy, but this time the old man and the dog seemed to have lost all their natural majesty to the unnatural gleam of the non-energy-saving bulb above. And this made me think back my childhood house where I grew up so many years ago; it was home to switches with adjustable dimming control of the light, and I continued to think "If I had these switches where I live now, would I dim the light? Or would I just flick the switch off altogether?"
Evidently, the picture was still circulating around in my mind, so I decided to leave the living room in hope of ridding myself of the pictures controlled ownership, which it had beset upon me.
I returned back to the kitchen where I was reintroduced to the disordered cereal and the spoiled milk. The best before date still read (26/04), and my intolerance of the unresolved date of this day, today, grew towards a melancholic state of mind; for I had no telephone, no computer, and no watch.
I was at a loss for what to do.
I sat down on a single chair which occupied the kitchen table, and like fed up child began to flick through some loose papers which had gathered impressively over time. To my surprise I unearthed a magazine hidden beneath the depths of all the unimportant scribbles and drawings above. The print was January's edition of the Men's health magazines; I had once subscribed yearly to them but later cancelled the subscription due to reasons unbeknown to me now. My only concern, my only priority at this moment was to uncover what today's date was.
On the front of the cover was a man of Herculean comparison, who to me possessed the most unconvincing smile. It was a false smile. A smile as if he was honestly overjoyed with his metallic appearance. It was uncanny. There were all sorts of various slogans and indicative quotations printed invariably around the edges of the cover, along the lines of: The five most versatile watches, Save your heart with raisins, How to do the Zercher squat, and so drolly forth.
I started to flick through the frivolous contents with a dejected, carefree approach of speedy disregard, and as the bimonthlies remaining half a dozen or so pages dwindled away, something caught my eye. And there, on page seventy-five, the right side of the two page spread was an article entitled "Double Your Productivity" under the fore-title, "Smashing Stress". It wasn't these words which were the reason to why I had temporarily hovered over page Seventy-Five; it was the anecdotal scribbles, the thickened circles of meaningless random words, and a small doodle of questionable depiction which had encompassed my meddlesomeness.
All of the now encaged, circled words intrigued me more than anything, and I started to decipher their mysterious meanings.
There were a total of twelve words which had been entombed and in no particular order were as follows: Learn, Cut, Chase, Body, Power, Office, Women, Improve, Time, Meet, and Date.
“Date? DATE?” I screamed to myself somewhat pathetically.
That last word “Date” increasing my now perplexed and irrational thinking by tenfold! I jerked an impulsive reaction which closed the magazine abruptly, then threw it across the kitchen floor in haste.
The other words had lost their connection with me altogether and I cared not for them anymore. The word 'Date' stood out like a sore thumb; it pulsated through my mind like a tiring old headache which seems to linger there forever, and I had once again been reminded of what I was doing prior to my brochure fascination.
I arose from the slumber of my chair, and walked over to the sink. There was a mixture of dirty plates and cutlery spread unorganised across the basin and I didn't bother to attend to them. Instead I looked up, and found myself transfixed with a reflection; it was brought to life from the darkness of outside against the light from within, set upon the mirrored window pane. It was my reflection. And as I stared moronically at a face which closer resembled a stranger, than myself, I swear I was thinking a blind nothing at all. All I could hear were the loose drippings of water which fell every so often beneath me.
My mind was blank, I felt no life.
I stood there for a further moment when I enquired out loud.
"What date is it today?"
Nothing, and no one replied. So I quickly returned to my sceptical, daydreaming state of mind.