Guiltessly Rested

When they were guilty of restlessness.

And so their story took form when the years duped them to becoming adults. Duped because adult-hood is not not a sorrowful hood to reside in. They signed papers, they paid bills, they bought china plates decorated with a gilt of gold on their rims, they scheduled times to exercise, they worked and they made travel plans and they circled dates on calendars and crossed off days of the week, they got better at calculations. But most of all… 

They had to measure their words so that they understand the length and width of their impact. They had to weigh their actions so that they experience both the burden and the lightness of being. They had to clean up after themselves so that other people won’t see their clumsiness and the clutter of their messy lives. 

They packed away their individuality into drawers, and ran to fold in any piece of its’ cloth that crept out. Any day spent relaxing was a day filled with lethargic guilt. They felt they could only feel guiltlessly rested when they were guilty of restlessness. 

They varnished each door to cover the many scratches of youth, and scrubbed the crayon drawings from their college years off of their walls with a sponge drenched in a bowl of soap. They filled the drill holes, where flimsy framed posters were hung, with silicon. Idolizing anyone became a laughable thing at their age so they tore down the pictures of their heroes and replaced them with canvas paintings of crazy dead painters to win the consent of sophistication. 

They vacuumed the dust of their innocence, and scrupulously mopped the floors of honesty with strong chemical agents of cautious truth. Until everything was spotless and clean that it hurt the eye to look at it. 

There was not one speck of childishness in the area, all colors turned to beige. Not even adolescence stood a chance on the sparkly clean marbles of adult-hood. Nothing could breathe or flutter in this faraday cage of maturity. Their bodies had to constantly adapt to the heated radiation of powerful antagonism from adult partnerships, so that it does not contaminate their clean zone. They couldn’t help how it came in through the windows from towers erected on other people’s homes. The high frequencies cooked their cells but adaptive evolution saw them through it. 

Oxygen was sucked from their lungs by the environment of reason, so they breathed off of each other’s breath unreasonably to survive, even when they were asleep. They took large bites off of each other’s years, overstuffing themselves and feeling too full on each other’s birthdays. They hugged each other so tight on their anniversaries, and neither would tell the other that they are sorry, so sorry, to have to grow up.

They sat together in their new gleaming living room each evening – day in and day out – feet up, head thrown back from the exhaustion of having a normal day. On days that inched towards a slightly better level of routine, they set out to plan their robotic technical standardized future as if they were not already living it. 

And if either of them told someone of this strange thirsty feeling that adulthood bore on them, they would be consoled that they are just where they need to be – a good place – this is just how it should be, how it is, and thank God it’s not worse. 

It’s been years that they live in this clean colorless space, swiping through stories on social media to see how other people can manage being a resident in adult-hood, and then inviting those people over for dinner hoping for maturity to rub off on them and make things easier to understand. 

Husbands made jokes about their wives’ cooking and everyone laughed. Wives made jokes about their husbands’ laziness and everyone laughed. The breadwinner wives talked more than their husbands. The breadwinner husbands made excessive loud remarks that ended with snorts and grunts. The others more resentfully equal remained quite and ate a lot. They wanted to tear their eyes out of their sockets, but they kept them coddled there and every once in a while their mouths would twitch from the effort. They just wanted to be children again. 

They learned from their parent-friends that they can only be children again if they had a baby. But they didn’t want to make a baby just to be children again; they wanted to perform CPR to revive their own boyishness and girlishness before giving life to another. They couldn’t handle cutting more cords. They were called self-centered but they couldn’t feel more self-sacrificing. They were forced to find a coping mechanism, adhering to regularity as if it’s the only condiment to spread on their bread. 

All the girl in her, and all the boy in him, was muffled behind a bedroom door in two separate homes far from the new living space they cleaned together. And they were supposed to just live in adult-hood washing everything around them as they glide, apart from their roles, because they say this is what it means to be one.  

And then before they knew it, mid-life crisis arrived at their door with a box of crayons, and brand new rollerblades for each of them. They looked at each other like kids do on Christmas morning, and grabbed the gifts before slamming the door on the desperate face of this crisis.  They sat down to make sense of their unexpected visitor and then made a conscious decision to wear neon socks and put on their rollerblades to skate around their clean home of adult-hood. 

They rolled away the Persian carpets and swept away hairs that may stick to their wheels. They skated like maniacs. They drew skid marks all over the floors, his were grey and hers were red. They bumped into walls and chipped off the white paint from their gypsum skirting. They put up posters of who they wanted to be and they called it a “vision board”. They diluted the chemical agents of cautious truth they formerly mopped their home with, and started spilling out dangerous stories about themselves to each other, just so that they could better live in their messy entirety.  

They took all the words known to humanity and stripped off all their sharp edges until they measured to be no bigger than strands of feathery hair that readily slide through one’s fingers. They made castles out of smooth pebbles in the middle of their bathtub and let their dog roll in it. They let their hair grow. They laughed hysterically. 

They emptied bags and bags of their actions until they weighed near to nothing. The husband let the wife leave her books and papers scattered around and they only planned to watch movies with their guests until, to their relief, no one came over to visit them. They painted flowers around wall stains, and left notes for each other on mirrors. The dust of guiltlessness caked the corners with mud from humidity and neither of them made a comment on how corners of a good home should look like. 

They had two fetal hearts of gold that some called “old souls”, and yet they were tainted with the harmless mischief of children, which others called “careless”. There was nothing old about their soul, nothing careless about their hearts. So they stopped falling for any more dupes, and they stopped becoming adults. They left its hood to enter the wilderness of an erratic mid-life zone. 

That’s how they were. And that’s how they fell in love again. And when no one was around them to lie to them and tell them that they looked like a nice adult couple, that’s when they loved each other the hardest, that’s when they were most devoted to their oneness. 

Like children, their love only brimmed with reason when they were both this unreasonable. And although they kept a cleaner home in adult-hood, the edges of the plates they ate from would never again be adorned with the golden gilt of guilt. They would eat even cleaner and simpler food off of plain plates, as long as they ate to survive. 

But PLEASE, they told each other when they took their rollerblades off before jumping into bed, never again be tricked into being adults. That hood was a bad one. 

The night that mid-life crisis gave those two children their crayons and rollerblades was the first night in many years that they let each other breathe without stealing each other’s oxygen. They anyway cuddled too close for any oxygen of reason to stand a chance. They only found each other again when they were well out of the precinct of adult-hood, right on the borderline of unreasonableness. They were only the best couple, when they weren’t.  

_{Beisan A. Alshafei}

_{June 20th, 2020}