The intermittent sound of a hair dryer turning on and off is coming from my left. Rico is getting ready for an interview. The morning sun pierces through the occasional cloud and seems to shine right into my eye. Is the sunshine intuitive for finding me, or am I for finding it?
The cat crosses from left to right ― from bathroom to kitchen to living room to bedroom where Zara is ― in search for some sort of adventure in this hallway apartment, and I can’t help but anthropomorphise the line she travels, seeing a head, a torso, legs, and feet beginning at the bedroom and ending at the bathroom, and the cat seems to be sitting innuendously right where the legs connect to the chest. I wonder if houses have chakras, and I wonder if I’m a jackass for thinking that.
I ask Rico what the lowermost chakra is called.
She tells me that left and right and up and down are all relative.
“But it’s called the root.”
The kitchen has a musty storage room smell that gives me a sudden wave of nostalgia. I remember what my mom looked like in 2008. Like my sister does now. I’ll probably get my first wrinkle soon. But I don’t know if it’ll be laugh lines from smiling too much or forehead lines from straining my face all the time. I make both expressions together when I see Zara with a bag of laundry and they look at me like I’m crazy. “You should have told me. We coulda done laundry together,” I tell her, but she walks away like she’s had enough of me.
Rico presses eight of her fingers along my temple and the last two in the centre of my forehead. She says she saw this on TikTok. We had all decided to live together so we could remember what it was like to be aware. The bathroom tiles are cold on my back.
I can feel the inside of my brain. “It’s very dark,” I tell her.
“Sorry, let me get the lights.” It’s bright again just as she releases my head from her grip.
“Are you… getting something from this?” I ask Zara. Someone is playing ‘Hey’ by the Pixies on the TV.
“Are you learning something?” Rico reframes the question. I nod at Rico as if to say yes, that’s saying it more eloquently and turn back to Zara. We’re chained.
“I think… I’m just about to,” Zara says. They have ribbons tied to their leg and arm and are draped like a hammock across the ceiling of our bedroom. We’re chained.
The cat steps on the TV remote and the music goes silent and Zara’s body slips off the ribbons and falls onto the bed. “I’ve got it!” they bounce up saying.
It’s been four years since we’d all decided not to see each other again when I run into Zara and Rico at the bodega a block from my new apartment.
“We just moved in two blocks in that direction,” Rico says pointing. Zara is holding the cat in their arms. We walk from the block with the bodega, to the block with my apartment, to the block with their new apartment. It’s taller than all the other buildings around. I look back and see the cat walking along the trail we left and the sun seems to be following her. Right to left, left to right, back and forth, and so on.
(DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction. Any names or characters, businesses or places, events or incidents, are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.)
Musa Tarar is a student, a writer, a computer scientist, or somewhere in between. He is based in New York, for now