Lily in my house

Lily got up whenever the spirit moved her, and the rest of the time she lounged around like a panther, prowling curiously through my house like some nineteenth-century flâneur, following her nose wherever it happens to take her. From time to time she would pause and peer deeply into a slice of my previous life…a black and white photo of me in Africa standing beside a tall tribesman holding a spear. I feel the discomfort slowly seeping into soul whenever she darts back and forth at the picture and me. It’s as if she’s searching for some thing. There are certain things I never want talk about. My life as a cocoa planter in Africa. A picture of me standing beside a muddy jeep in South America when I used to grow sugar cane in Honduras. Then her searching eyes move on to a man standing beside a woman beside a strange three seater pram with three babies framed against the the Singapore skyline. Lily touches these photographs fleetingly. She moves as if she’s able to summon some sinister force that is able to decipher all hopes, aspirations and shattered dreams. And for a brief moment I feel transparent. Touched even before her knowing eyes. In that one moment when her liquid clear eyes glinted, it was as if she was right there. In Uganda when I stood on a hill and watched the militia sack my cocoa plantation. She saw it all – to the Villa Mare of the Honduras where I separatist once nationalized by sugarcane plantation – to Singapore where I tried. God knows I tried to be a law abiding salaried man. But it just didn’t work out – Lily seems to be able to read, sense and even feel the textures of all these emotions that once coursed through my veins.

It’s as if she’s in some museum. Not any museum. But one that has managed to successfully summarized the sum of all my life works along with so many failures and she just looks on.

 

There was an indescribable mix of languor and intensity about the way she carries herself. As if she isn’t beholden to the clock or to some grand design in the way most people see themselves in the world – and as a consequence her expression is never assaulted by the idea that she should be somewhere else doing something else. It’s this simple idea that enthralls me. The idea that someone who I hardly know at all can just read me so clearly that I even feel she shares many of the thrills of my success along with the many agonies of my defeat. I don’t need to explain to Lily. She just knows. That’s what unsettles me about Lily. Lily Tye is not the sort of woman that any man fucks and forgets. Some women can stick in a man’s mind like chewing gum and color his days for the rest of his life. They’re simply unforgettable. I know. Don’t ask me how I know . I just know. And the last thing I need now is complication in my already complicated life – I already have problems trying to fashion a convincing excuse why I couldn’t spent time with my wife and kids during CNY. And now I am not even sure how this story would even end with this intriguing woman who has suddenly whirled herself into my life.

 

Lily affects me. Perhaps more than I care to admit it. Just a while ago, I was all dressed in my Khaki’s ready to hit the field to join the farm hands to dig a ditch or something that usually leaves me soaking wet in sweat – when she straightened my collar – suddenly my resolve for the day just evaporated. Poof! Just like that. Only for me to take off my heavy belt and set it aside as I joined her for a lazy breakfast in the verandah- when Lily is around me that delectable mood of languor seems to infect me. I find myself resisting it at first. But its so natural for me to want to be part of it – that soon I find myself giving in to this mysterious pull – whenever I am in Lily’s grip. The division between work and idleness crumbles away almost imperceptibly away. Leaving nothing except her. It’s as if she has suddenly made herself the center of my world. 

 

Everything in my life suddenly fell into a peculiar category that knew neither time, space or purpose. I was suddenly in a foreign land. A place that I could not even recognize any longer.

I guess it must have showed in my face as she placed her hand on mind reassuringly and smiled affectionately.

 

Where am I?

 

Who am I?

 

What I am doing?

 

Where will all this lead too?