Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem
She wasn’t agoraphobic, per se.
She was just terrified of disorganization.
Everything in her house had a label and a place.
She never travelled.
Not even to the store.
A delivery man came twice a month,
flirted in her door frame,
dropped off her lettuce, tomatoes and cans of tuna,
and never suspected that she never left her house.
It may have been a comedy
or it may have been a tragedy.
Whatever it was, it was the fear of the great outdoors
that consumed her.
That vast, unravished, disorganized mess of nature
without labels
without schedules
without timetables and graphs
where plants grow to and fro,
water comes and goes as it pleases
and the sun decides when it will shine.
She lost herself in stories
in tales of far-away places
where the rapture of the outdoors was confined
to the neat pages of her book.
She read about adventures
and non-adventures
in the hillside,
in the jungle,
in the plains of Africa.
She read from an overstuffed couch
labelled “couch”
in her living room,
labelled “living room”
that was, after all, a room for living.
She’d inherited the home from her mother -
a corpulent old woman with heavy knees
that knocked together as she walked down the halls.
“Be careful when you go to the park, dear.
You never know what they put in those sandboxes.”
“Watch your step on the sidewalk, my love.
You could trip over the dandelions.”
For, you see, she used to leave the house quite often.
She couldn’t stand the mothball reek of the cupboards
or the peeling paint of the patio
or the stifling smother of a mother who didn’t know how to love.
After her mother had succumbed to cancer -
chaotic cells abhorring order -
she had slowly stopped venturing forth
and outside ceased to exist.
The only outside was inside
and inside was carefully labelled and shuffled into its appropriate places.
Since she never saw the outdoors,
her skin had become pale and parched,
dying of the thirst for sunlight.
Her hair was matted and greying
despite her young age
because it had stopped producing natural oils long ago.
The yard outside her mother’s house
was overgrown and running rampant
with ivy creeping towards the banister and
enormous smiling yellow weeds greeting passersby from the yard,
as if to say: “This house has not been condemned.
It has only been condemned by those in it!”
But one day, the delivery man brought a bottle of wine.
“It’s on the house” he said
and with the tip of his hat, he sauntered back to his truck
quite happy with himself
hoping his small gift could loosen this poor young woman up
and maybe garner him a smooch or two when he saw her next.
She backed away from the door, dragging the bags to the kitchen,
unloading lettuce and tomatoes into drawers labelled “lettuce and tomatoes”
and cans upon cans of tuna into cupboards labelled “tuna”.
The bottle of wine,
Sitting upon her counter-top
had no place.
She couldn’t even bring herself to throw it in the garbage pail
(labelled garbage)
for it hadn’t been opened yet.
So she reached into a drawer
pulled out a opener
and corkscrewed that bottle open.
Was it garbage if she had only opened it?
Need she not consume some?
She grabbed a wine glass, dusty with disuse
(a place for wine glasses but no wine!)
rinsed it in the sink and filled it to the brim
with the sickly, bittersweet nectar of the devil.
The wine grabbed hold of her and made her forget herself.
She finished the glass immediately,
gulping it down like water for the fasting.
Since she had neither tasted wine
nor inherited the corpulence of her mother,
she was instantly drunk and began stumbling about the house,
laughing to herself
laughing at herself
tearing books and vases from their labelled shelves
tossing everything in a heap
in the room for living
until, quite exhausted, she came to the banister.
She tottered on it,
balancing like a ballerina,
giggling and smiling
at the smiling yellow flowers.
And without so much as a thought or a hesitation
she launched herself into the yard.
Then she dared continue through the gate
and onto the sidewalk.
Terror had not yet manifested in her
so she boldly stepped forth into the street
looking this way and that
and suddenly marvelling at how it had changed over the years.
She saw lines in the street marking partitions for parked cars;
she saw street signs pointing the way,
labelling directions, speeds, and places.
She saw houses with fences all around
and neatly mowed lawns in geometric patterns.
She saw trees lining roads,
spaced evenly apart,
each with its own circle of dirt to be nourished from.
She saw buildings with addresses and signs
and little flowerbeds that had been planted
in alternating colours:
red, then yellow, then red again.
Oh, the delightful organization of it all.
She saw people following pathways
and avenues,
cars driving down boulevards, following the curve of the road,
never daring traverse the centre line
like an invisible wall containing them.
She saw people in those cars and on those pathways
listening to music
or talking on phones
their minds far far away from the places their feet fell.
She saw streetlights dormant in the sun of the day,
stretching their metal arms like futuristic trees.
She saw, with glee, that everything ran according to a schedule.
The buses came at the right time.
Rush hour fell during the same block of moments each day.
People were typically and predictably and wonderfully
organized!
For, you see, while she had spent years buried in a home
buried in books
about other places,
confined by the walls of her living room
like the stories were confined by pages,
the people outside had gone on living.
They had taken it upon themselves
to take that vast, unravished, disorganized mess of nature
and give it labels
and schedules
and timetables and graphs
so that the only outside was like the inside
and inside was carefully labelled and shuffled into its appropriate places.
She stumbled backward, towards home,
a delicious grin enveloping her aged face
and promptly fell, headfirst, into the ivy,
drunk on its scent,
enraptured with its creeping arms encircling her
as she had imagined so many times
that the delivery man would do for her.
In her ecstasy, she died:
her lips still burnt by the red stain of the wine
her eyes open and unseeing of the heavens above
her dandelions pushing up through the ground beneath her.
