The remnants of my fins (The clockwork boxes 2)

However, I have to  continue and explain precisely how I came across the clockwork boxes city. It is more than obvious to me now that it was a prearranged meeting and that after all I hadn’t stumbled by accident in that place. Something that I couldn’t understand very well then, drove me there. But it took me  a lot of time to realise. No meeting is really accidental. All meetings in life happen for some reason. My reason did not exist back then. It was necessary for me to create this reason on my own and blow over it like a little god, just to give my bored breaths a chance. Moreover, it took me time to understand a lot of things that were hidden inside me, so that I could be in the position to know that in the depths of my body, in the inner valleys of my bones, behind my fragile veins and the confusing roads of my ugly blood vessels, there is a dweller without multiple faces, without mirror reflections and mirage games, as I tended to believe until that very moment. There was only one man without many skin layers, a man who was eating his food calmly, scratching like a dog the dead cells- peeling like thin papers- behind his ear, talking without stop to his only and one self and  fighting with the third hand which was sprouting out of his chest..wild hand, threatening to grab him and suffocate him by throwing him at the floor like a fresh big fish. It was the time that I was convinced I could  find hidden remnants of fish scales on my naked body. I decorated my bathroom floor with a big curved mirror on which I used to lie, looking from a close distance every pore of my complexion, struggling to find remains from a forgotten fin and listening  carefully to my breathing, being certain that I could recognize in its gurgling complaining end, the throbbing traces from the secret gills which were spreading like a moss colony in my lungs.

What a revelation and what series of explosions did the sight of the deeper parts of my brain, bring ! Depths that I was the only one to know their existence in me, their waters stirred like dark lakes, every time I got upset or excited. A true revelation.

I was close to the tube entrance  heading for the left department, where the rolling stairs were. I was searching for some dimes in my pocket, thinking that once more I had forgotten to take my wallet with me. I was wondering what I could do, I had already been tired from walking. That day I had gone too far and now my feet felt too weak to carry me back all this way. It had started snowing, making me feel angrier for my absent-mindness. Of course the rolling stairs were stuck, it would be a strange thing to find them functioning properly. I had to go from the other stairs, the stairs which were all the time crowded by coughing people, running legs, pushing hands. These stairs made me feel the urge to stick my body onto the wall and not move from there, closing my eyes tightly. I preferred to swim on the central square pavement tiles with people around me laughing and throwing their coins in my hat, than be forced to descend these stairs. I hated them..  So much roughness, so much grey, so much squalor ..I could see the spits on them, a colony of spits under my feet, some time a giant saliva will run down these stairs rinsing us all to the nearest drain pipe.

Image: Jean Cocteau photographed by Irving Penn