#molloy

Don’t wait to be hunted to hide.

I am reading Molloy by Beckett right now. What a weirdo.

#dailydrawing #molloy #hiding
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deepwaterwritingprompts:

Text: I sort through my handful of little eyes, all blinking up at me. Choosing one, I let it slip into the crack between door and wall, to keep watch while I sleep. 

A few months ago I decided to finally get organized. It was the eyes that pushed me to it. I’d shut down the laptop and was about to go to bed, and so I reached into the drawer and came up with a handful of eyes, all blinking up at me. And at that moment they looked very pitiful and pleading, as tiny as they were, and I felt bad for having to pick just one.

It was hours later, lying in bed, that I thought about how haphazard my selection process was: that if I picked an eye out of the group every night, and put it back in with the rest the next morning, it was possible that there were some eyes in the group that had never once gotten picked in all the years I’d had them. Just lying down at the bottom in the dust, or worse still, getting scooped out in a handful and every single time having their hopes dashed as they went back into the darkness of the drawer. Or, as I concluded, in the very worst case scenario, I was somehow unlucky enough to keep picking out the same single eye night after night, and so it alone had ever gotten to watch over me, and the great mass of them had only ever lain in the darkness, to have this monstrous unfairness reaffirmed every single time.

Well, you can tell that kept me up all night. I had to change things up after that. The very first thing I did the next morning was to get two separate boxes. Every time I picked out an eye, afterwards I’d transfer it from the first box into the second. And so on, until all the eyes had had their turn and been transferred from one box to another, and then I’d switch boxes and start over from the top. This worked well enough for the first couple of weeks, but then I got to thinking again. Imagine I only had seven eyes (I have more, but just to keep it simple): On the first day, I take eye number one, slip it in the crack between the door and the wall, and let it keep watch while I sleep. Then the next day I remove it and discard it in box two, and then so on for eye two, eye three, eye four, all the way til the end of the week.

All well and good. But then imagine: that first eye might spend the entire second week not getting picked, not right up until the end. That would be a full two weeks spent in the darkness. And then to make matters worse, it’s entirely possible that the same eye might get picked again the very next night after that, and so spend yet another two weeks in the dark.

And you might say, oh, but it got two nights in a row up in the door to make up for it. But two nights in a row is hardly better than one night, I should think. Because it’s not a matter of quantity. One night, after a week in darkness, would be heavenly. A second night after that, you start to get accustomed to it. And then to be cast into the dark twice as long as you would be normally - I think that would be horrible. And of course it’s much longer than a week, or two weeks, given how many eyes I have. I don’t know how you’d stand it. I couldn’t subject anyone to that.

What I would need to do, to be truly fair, would be to get a sort of calendar, like those advent calendars you get sometimes, or a pillbox, each eye with its own individual container, and I would go through them all in order, snap-snap-snap like crossing off dates. But that would never work out. I just don’t have the storage space for something like that. And besides, sometimes the eyes slip out from the door during the night, or I lose them, and sometimes I pick up a new eye here and there, and so the count is always going up and down, and trying to insert a new one into the schedule would require making room for them and moving all the boxes up or down one slot, and it would be such a terrible hassle.

So what I came up with in the end was a reasonable compromise. I have four boxes, the eyes split roughly evenly between three of them, and the fourth left empty. When I’m going to bed, I take an eye from box one and slip it between the door and the wall. The next morning, I take it down and transfer it to box four (the empty one), and then I continue in this way until box one is empty and box four is full of used eyes. Then, I transfer the contents of box two to box one, box three to box two, and box four to box three. And then, with box four newly emptied, I start the cycle all over again.

This way, I limit the number of days an eye can go without being used, since it’s guaranteed that every eye will get its turn in its third of the cycle. And even though there might be a variance of several days since their last outing, depending on how many eyes are in each box at the time, I think splitting it up into thirds makes the extremes not large enough to be drastic. So that reassured me everything would work out.

It’s an imperfect solution, I admit. Sometimes I think if I’m going to try to be fair then I should be as fair as I can be, and go ahead and get individual boxes for each of them. And then that leads me to thinking that maybe I’m in the wrong for leaving them in the dark for so long to begin with, and if I really want to be a good person maybe I should stick them up all around the house, up on shelves and in nooks and crannies, so that they could watch me all day as much as they liked.

But that would be unbearable, having all those eyes scattered around my house, swiveling around and staring at me, watching my every move. Then I think maybe the ethical thing to do would be to get rid of them if I’m not going to use them, if they’d creep me out so badly, keep just one to watch over me at night. But then I don’t think I could bear it, reaching down into the drawer night after night for that one eye, and seeing it look up at me all pitiful and pleading. It would be so unfair, worse than anything. I’d want to shut the drawer right then and leave it there, safe in the darkness, where it wouldn’t have to look at me at all.