I, unlike everybody else, but also like everybody else, watched as her enormous red boots pedaled down the road. I hoped that she does not run over me, but that did not matter much. I was too busy staring at the movement of her boots and the enormous waves of flying mud and water the giant tires of her bicycle made as she easily pedaled.
You do not see many bicycles in this city. You do not see many girls in this city. You never see girls wearing enormous red boots in this city. And You definitely do not see a girl with enormous red boots riding bicycles in the roads of this city. So I watched as she drove down the road, like everybody else did, but not like everybody else.
After forever of watching her pedaling down the road, coming closer to me, her enormous boots growing larger and larger, I started sincerely worrying that she might run those giant but thin tires over me, or that the enormous waves of flying mud and rainwater would cover and choke me. It is not like it mattered, but I thought it would be painful, and I do not want mud all over me, the enormously hot sun would make it dry and glue me to the bloody pavement even more. As if my life was not already hard enough with me laying here, abandoned, small, and out of my mind.
She did not run over me. Which is good news, but her tires splashed mud on my body and it filled my eyes and mouth, which is horrible news.
I heard her bike breaks fighting the slippery road until finally the squeaks her pedals made and the way her tires shook the ground came to a halt. I heard her jump off the bicycle and I heard the mud splashed as an aftermath of the earthquake resulted by the collusion of her boots and the ground fall back to the ground again.
I heard the sound of her wet boots colliding with the ground with every step she made towards me, and I heard my own heartbeats quickening and growing stronger.
(Conclusion: When you are extremely small, too heavy for your own legs to carry you, your eyes covered in mud, and glued to the ground; your hearing becomes much better.)
I heard the cracks her vertebrae made as she bent her enormous back an enormous bend down to pick little, abandoned, out-of-his-mind, I of the ground.
I felt her enormously hot breath melting the snowflakes that glued me to the pavement, and I felt the giant cracks of the fingerprints on the tip of her fingers brush the mud off my eyes.
I saw her large eyes stare at the little, maniac, and abandoned, I that was now laying between her palms, and observe me, wholly.
She finally took me back to her bicycle, her red bicycle, as I can see now, and bent her back again, as she took out a small box, not so small, I could fit in… Opened it, and put me inside of it. She then stuffed us, the box and I, back in her bag, and abandoned us in there.
I thought to myself that it was sad that my first journey away from the spot I was stuck to for as long as I can remember, and my first time being less abandoned, and not on the ground was in a small box, in a red bicycle, ridden by a girl with enormous eyes and enormous red boots.
I then again thought to myself, “why exactly was it sad?”, and to that, I could not find an answer, so I thought that maybe if I take a nap, and wake up, maybe then I’ll know why was I sad. That or the sadness would be gone.
Sleeping my way to solutions is a method my advanced calculus teacher showed me back when I was not so small, less abandoned, and a little closer to my mind.
Back then, I took advanced calculus classes, and learned three different languages, and I wanted to become a painter, but I ended up a receptionist clerk on a desk, and then there was no desk, and no such thing as a clerk, and absolutely no one to receive, which is quite melancholic.
I woke up to the pop of the box as it opened. My eyes burnt with all the light that suddenly filled the box and heated the cushion I was sleeping on. I wanted turn on my stomach and hide my face from the light and the heat. However, I think that after all of this time being asleep, and laying on cold hard ground, frozen and glued, I forgot how to use my body, because I tend to forget things after not doing them. Exactly like how I forgot how to solve advanced calculus problems after years of sitting on the reception desk, which now, I forgot how to do, too.
She finally saved me as two of her fingers grabbed me, supposedly gently, but actually not, and put me on her legs after she jumped on an old couch in her house and turned the TV and tuned in to a harry potter movie.
I know it is a sofa, and a TV and an old harry potter movie because I had a sofa and a TV exactly like those, and the very same DVD player on which she is playing the Harry potter movie.
I sat there on her lap for two hours (I remember they used to be two hours, I do not know how long are harry potter movies now that I am very small, and very out of my mind). I ate all the chips crunches that fell from her chips bag every time she sticked her enormous hand in there, taking out a few to eat. I also mumbled the hexes, jinxes, spells and charms along with the wizards on the screen so I could impress the girl whose lap I was laying on, eating potatoes.
Yet, she did not notice.
When the movie was finished, she got up, after picking me off her lap, and carried me down the corridor to her room. She abandoned me, again, on the still of the sole window of her bedroom, the exact seat window of my room a long time ago, and went to bed.
You know what time I hate the most? Post-midnight.
I did not sleep that night. I thought to myself that this could be because of the cold weather, and the fact that I had slept all day long inside of a much tighter, much cozier small box, where I was abandoned, by a person who was awake back then, and whose snores did not fill the silence of the room, back then.
I then remembered that I had this issue for a long time, this not-sleeping-at-night issue.
Long before I started spending my nights laying on one of my sides staring at empty roads and the doors of closed shops, with only the company of baby dogs, puppies, that tried to take care of me and lullaby me to sleep, but fell asleep before I do, and gave up at last. I used to spend my nights staring at a blank ceiling identical to this of this room.
I had colors and many canvases on which I finger-painted everything.
I had forgotten how to do everything, but my fingers tell me that I can still paint. So I get up, as the first movement I do in ages, and climb up the window pane. I stand on my light feet, my knees trembling, cackling like silver spoons, but my fingers finally reach out for the fogged up glass.
As the tip of my index touches the cold glass, I realize that I do not know what to draw.
I ask myself, “What do I draw?”
-“Try a hangman noose!”
“Why?”
“It’s fun to draw.”
“It’s not.”
“Yes it is, don’t you remember? Come on, just draw it.”
And so I did.
“Now who do I hang?”
“No, we’re done with hanging.”
I then collapsed, my knees could no longer stand, and I was very tired, so I slept. Shaking, cold, and no protection for my bare skin from the freezing air and exposure. I slept. No blanket for me but my little maniac warm dreams.
I woke up at a dawn when the snow on the rooftops of houses down the empty roads I could see out the window had melted.
The red bicycle parked right below the window was now tied to the ground with vine roses that tangled it and grew between the spokes, tying them to the pedals, and up to the rims, making it a colorful sculpture of red, greens, and flowers’ colors.
The enormous girl’s snores had stopped and turned into small, calm, breaths.
Now in the light, that I had my dose of sleep, I could finally solve the equation to why I had been feeling like I was going through a very long, very vivid session of Déjà vu. It is because I was.
This room, that TV, this window, and the street outside of it… everything in here was a mine when I was bigger than this, and a little bit less maniac.
I finally got up, stared at the reflection of those black round eyes, the purple hair strands that are still glowing, the round ears on the top of my head and I thought: “Dammit, I look familiar.”
When she woke up, she finally put me inside her cabinet to watch over her clothes while she abandoned me and got away. But the abandoning didn’t last for long. And I now refer to myself, most of the time, as the small, taken-care-of, maniac, talking-to-itself teddy-bear.
