Constructing the World

Richard was a data entry clerk, and he worked from home. He typed information into the computer all day, his fingers pecking away at the keys. The apartment that he lived in, like all affordable apartments in the city, had thin walls and was devoid of charm. The carpet was a dull gray, the walls were off white, and the place was sparsely furnished with the essentials: table, desk, chairs, etc. Not one decorative ornament sat collecting dust on a shelf. For that matter, Richard didn’t even own a shelf beyond the one in his kitchen that held his cooking utensils: one pot and one pan. There were spoons in a drawer by the phone.

Richard had a lot of appreciation and awe for things that others may have considered mundane, and even gross. For example, when the girl above him flushed her toilet, the water rushed through the pipes in his wall, hissing like seeds through a rain stick. It was almost meditative. Richard felt accomplished when he thought up similes like these to describe his otherwise drab existence.

Richard knew the girl who lived above him because he had gotten her mail once. Her name was Sarah, and she had invited him in for lemonade when he went to return it to her. The whole time they were making small talk, sitting on her beat up sofa behind the water stained coffee table, he had wanted to tell her about the pipes. He had wanted to tell her that she influenced his world in such a personal way; instead they had talked about matters of little consequence to Richard. The girl had told him about how well kept she thought the community pool was. “I haven’t been there,” admitted Richard.

“You should check it out sometime. I’m usually there on Saturdays at 6:00.”

“I’ve never enjoyed the pool. The chlorine always irritates my eyes.”

Richard never played basketball or hung out in the clubhouse either, but strangers were always there. He knew this because his apartment was next to the clubhouse and basketball court of his complex, and through his thin walls he could hear the people there throughout the day, and often into the night. The dribbling of the basketball on the court and the muffled chatter of voices combined with the intermittent hissing in his walls to create a medley of life’s music. At times like these, his fingers yearned to soar. They wanted to fly over the keys, tapping out the rhythms of life.

Sometimes while Richard worked, inputting information for his employers, he felt like his fingers were in prison. He imagined miniature shackles attached to them, forcing them to stay in line. Sometimes Richard couldn’t take the toils of his routine, plucking at keys that didn’t matter to him. He wanted to breakout and write about life, but when he did that he reworked it so much that it became a distant thing. It wasn’t really part of him the way he portrayed it. Sometimes he wondered if the way he constructed life was indicative of insanity. As the world flowed through the pipes of his wall, and bounced on the cement below, Richard could see his mind within it. It was nestled amongst the particles of the universe, a small bit of matter encompassed in the infinite, and it didn’t seem to be of much consequence.

Nevertheless, when he wrote for himself, Richard constructed the world to his liking. He wanted to awe the masses with his eloquent words and deep insights. When inspiration took him, he would spend hours working on a new masterpiece. When he finished one, he would post it on his online blog journal. Sometimes his piece would elicit a response, and people would post their comments. Sometimes he received no feedback, and he took such instances as failures on his part. If no one commented, he figured he must have written poorly, and was embarrassed at what he had posted. The truth was that people cared about his writing far less than he thought, being preoccupied with seeking approval for themselves. When they did leave comments, they usually weren’t approvals for Richard’s work, but pleas of their own for perception as intelligent, insightful, or witty beings.

~.~

You could say that Sarah had once had a significant other in her life, but the truth is that he hadn’t played a positive role in the script of her existence. When Sarah had been upset about something he had done, she would howl at the moon. He would always ignore her, being so far removed from the world of Sarah. One day, she realized that her track was an ellipse, making the same patterns repeatedly, through better and worse. Although she was rich, her life was poor. So she gave it all up for the dream of changing the course of her existence. She had always been good at math in high school, and she missed the belief in herself that success afforded her. A new sign in the formula of life was all it took for Sarah to see her path alter from the confinement of the ellipse to the openness of the hyperbola. Her new path reached into the infinite of the unknown.

Sarah moved to an apartment in the city in order to be near the university. When she saved up enough money, she was going to go back to school to earn a degree in mathematics. She got a job as a waitress, but she barely made more than enough to cover her rent, car payments, and other bills. Six months later, she was still trying to adapt to city life. Those she considered friends were as numerous as the stars, but also as distant. Some nights, when she was feeling particularly melancholy and alone, she would sit outside on her balcony. It was on one of these nights that she noticed the man who lived below her, or at least she heard the frantic tapings of one of his passionate writing fits. As Richard’s fingers soared over the keyboard, tapping out the rhythms of life, the vibrations bounced off the walls, through the open window, and were picked up faintly, but audibly by Sarah’s ears. The sound of Richard’s typing was intriguing to Sarah. It was rhythmic, soothing, and made Sarah curious about the man living downstairs. She wanted to meet him, so she slipped her mail in his mailbox one day.

Sarah didn’t expect much out of the encounter, but she made homemade lemonade, and cleaned up the house anyway. He came the same day to return her mail. They talked for a while, and Sarah felt like there was something endearing about this quiet man who had so much to write, and so little to say. She wanted to tell him about how he influenced her life by giving her something to be interested in. Instead, they talked about things of little consequence to Sarah. Richard seemed down to Earth, and nothing like the previous man she had been with. She wanted to meet him again, so she told him about how well kept she thought the community pool was, even though she’d never been there. She hinted that he should check it out on Saturday at 6:00, when she planned on visiting the pool for the first time in hopes of meeting up with him.
Sarah didn’t know if Richard would show up at the pool, but she hoped that he would.

~.~

Richard checked off the days on his calendar, and continued to write through the week. He wrote for his job, and he wrote for himself. It was while he was free writing one night that he realized how much he liked Sarah. The title of his piece was “Things That are of Consequence in Life.” He wrote about the importance of communication, and the greatness of the postal service. He wrote about stained coffee tables, and how they were worth so much more than regular ones because they had character. Beyond that, they were proof of life. They were a testament to existence. An alter of the eternal coffee cups that keep us going. He wrote about sweet tasting lemonade, and the way in which the cold liquid made the taste buds on his tongue tingle as he sipped it. He wrote about the girl whose name he finally knew. He didn’t know that Sarah was on her balcony above him, catching every tap of every letter.

When Sarah got to the pool on Saturday, Richard was already there waiting for her. He was sitting at a table by the side of the pool, feeling self-conscious in his swim trunks without a shirt. His confidence returned when he spotted Sarah entering the gate, and she smiled at him. She walked directly to Richard and asked, “Is it okay if I join you?”

“I would like that.”

“I would like that too.”

~.~

Sarah eventually earned her degree and became a teacher of mathematics, but the most important lesson she ever taught was the one that Richard learned. She taught him that even though the world isn’t always beautiful, cheery, and exciting, sometimes it’s the mundane that is significant to our lives. Richard may not have been the center of the world, but he was the center of his world. He controlled it with white and gray reins, with white and gray matter. As for Richard’s writing career, he wrote the only story that really mattered to him. He wrote the story of Richard and Sarah, and it was a story constructed to his liking indeed. The two of them lived long lives. Things didn’t always turn out the way they wanted, but they treasured the good times, and they always managed to overcome their challenges. Through it all, their hearts beat with the rhythms of the world around them, pumping the blood through their veins like water through the pipes of their home.

Notes:
1. I'm not happy with a couple things here, including the ending. I'm posting it because there are some things that I am never satisfied with, and I think is just one of those stories.