‘Thank you, sir. This is indeed the motel I was looking for’.

Nooma fumbled for a few extra bucks in her satchel to offer the elderly taxi driver for the kindness that she had received from him during their extended journey.

They were the brightest neon lights that she had ever seen. ‘Well’, she thought, ‘they ought to be so bright if one has chosen to name this motel Neon Lights’. The intense illumination made the motel appear inviting. Adjacent to the motel, near the lay-by, was a tiny store where old-fashioned chandeliers and candelabra were sold. How splendid her surroundings seemed to Nooma!

After signing in at the motel, she was escorted to the third floor through the only way—the stairway. A clean place to stay is all that she wanted. The long flight of steps did not matter. Who was going out, any way?

The picture that her mind had constructed of the place was incredibly different from the real place in that they were geometrically like chalk and cheese. ‘Isn’t it instinctive to build an image of something that we have not seen the instant that we hear or read about it and so thrilling to see the difference between reality and fantasy?’ she thought as she delightedly surveyed the room.

Before indulging in reminiscence, she wanted to take a very cold shower. ‘Bathing is an activity that must be performed scrupulously, particularly after a long trip’, she told herself as she undressed. Horripilation—she wanted to sense utterly. She was stark naked, trembling.

The colour of the garments in the portmanteau was barely perceptible in the dusk of the room. After she had her nightdress on, she drew the curtains open. The balcony was broader than the bed and now she wanted to be there.

The public road facing the motel reminded her of yesterday. A day that seemed pleasant at the outset transformed into a heartrending day when she saw an injured cat on the highway. She could not forget the eyes of the cat lying helplessly in the middle of a thoroughfare. She had prayed for its passing before another collision. ‘What happened to the cat?’ she now wondered.

Across the street, she saw a gaily dressed little girl who had her hand clasped in her mother’s. ‘They must be tourists’, she presumed. Presently, she tried to pierce the child’s perception of the world—of the surrounding—for it may have once been hers. The duo soon disappeared from her view.

Nooma was now bothered by the sight of a slovenly old woman at the bus stop. One could tell by her appearance that she had not bathed for days, or possibly, months. She could see that the woman was clad in a golden-embroidered attire. Inspecting her scruffy junk from the balcony, Nooma thought that she noticed a festoon. If only the woman crossed the road for Nooma to take a closer look and quench her curiosity: she wanted to know what drove the woman to her present state—she wanted to hear her story. ‘Could it be that she does not remember where she came from? Did I see tears in the eyes of the woman?’ Presently, the woman screamed and laughed to herself. It is only after the nice street vendors began talking to her did she appear less manic to Nooma, who could have spent the entire night watching the object of her intrigue.

Every once in a while, passers-by stopped by the bistro to smoke or eat while the street dogs raptly waited near them, hoping that they would chuck a bun or two. One of them was pale, awfully feeble, and perhaps, on its last legs.

Rain was improbable tonight. Nooma was so engrossed in watching the moon’s hasty movement that she failed to notice the gleaming neighbouring entities. Her eyes followed the motion of the satellites only later. When they reached the periphery of the space encircling the moon, she captured the sight in her mind’s eye, hoping to picture the very sight later. She considered music an essential ingredient to be able to embrace such flashes in time, because it delineated her array of emotions, further penetrating her distant world—one that was created through wishful imagination. Her music was gone.

Nooma looked back in time in order to comprehend the sensation that was associated with a certain period—with a certain subject—but she soon chose to ignore the period and the subject, for she believed that she was only a marionette pirouetting to the music called life.

The brightest star of the night was wonderful to behold. No sooner had she begun to admire its glory than the star vanished into the deep blue skies of November. Once again, she remembered the stargazing enthusiast with whom she had an affair of the heart, and in whose presence her sense of self crushed to pieces that she could not distinguish: consumed with passion one instant, pondering the basis of such emotion the next. Presently she remembered the beauty of the dawning of their relationship—the surreality of  how they met.

‘Regardless of how profound his love seemed, it lost its profundity over time. Today, I realised that that professed depth was only a delusion’, she wrote yesterday.

One could hear from the curb the chortles and the prattles of young people. The smoke from all the fête of what seemed like a birthday dispersed in the atmosphere like velvet. One by one, Nooma was losing her friends; deep down, she did want it to come about.

Behind the feathery twig of the casuarina, with her eyes firmly locked, Nooma stood still. The longest night could have been tonight. She had neither the nerve to obliterate herself nor the heart to discomfort her dear ones. Suddenly, everything seemed to lack sense or purpose—nothing seemed concrete any longer and she was aware of the changes. If only one thought, out of the several occupying her mind presently, remained longer.

Suddenly, Nooma had a wistful desire to return to a former time in her life—evenings that were spent watching the drowning sun from the wounded wooden window of her childhood abode, listening to the only music that she knew then; a time when a departing sun aroused feelings of hopefulness and jubilation, and when a rising moon evoked a feeling of tolerable dread. ‘Why?’ she mused now as she mused then, albeit the musing was evanescent. Now, she called herself a nobody. Now, nothingness defined her. ‘But who is a nobody and what is nothingness? Am I somebody to whom nobody can relate? Is nothingness a state one reaches when one is drained?’ Was she close to feeling it again?

The door was shut. The curtains were drawn. Tonight, a long-lasting sleep that, when broken, will make the sore yesterday seem like a raw antiquity in which she was only a cold spectator was her desire.

‘It is a shame that something that was once regarded so deep transformed into something very shallow. Our vehement claims became a mockery. Our kisses became a thing of mindless passion. Our clandestine meetings became a vacuum of time. Forsaken was the one who stayed on.

‘I want to escape this torment—this unceasing questioning, this unceasing thinking—for as long as I can. There shall be none of that tonight, but only my body breathing in and breathing out. I shall forget my associations and my apprehensions. I shall not know who died or who suffered’, she decided as she listlessly prepared to spread the blue duvet.

At long last, she was encompassed by solitude and imaginings. She was falling into a reverie. Before long, she was breathing in and breathing out, without restraint.

On the rooftop covered by the arid leaves of autumn, below the stooped tree bearing flowers of her favourite shade of purple, it was her long-absent lover who had come to see her. ‘I knew it was mutual. I knew it would last. I was not living a lie! The waiting was worth it. You have come to see me! This is one of the most beautiful days of my life’. Only it was a dream—a manifestation of an unrealistic hope. If only the fleeting fantasy actualised. She slumbered again, hoping that she would dream the beautiful dream once again.

When Nooma awoke earlier than usual, she was unhappy to observe that nothing—except the duvet covering her cowered body—had changed its position. The sight of the half-drawn sun-bleached curtains, the branches of that feathery tree, and the unfastened green valise reflected the melancholies of a night spent in reflection. It was an unpleasant sight. She now had a sudden whim to take a walk, to be in high spirits like she once used to be. ‘It is hard to accept rejection’, she acknowledged, ‘but I had better learn to accept it without a gloomy disposition’, she added.

Shivering slightly under her loose jumper, Nooma walked briskly across the divided freeway that was still cloaked in haze. ‘Dawn is as grand as dusk’, she thought. To be as enduring as these trees, as appealing as those flowers, and as perfect as this instant—that was all that she wanted to be. Sorrows that kept her up at nights needed to be exhaled; they needed to be dissolved in air. And she would never inhale the air that disillusioned her, the air that poisoned her, the air that reduced her to nothingness. The long suffering had to end now. After all, it was not the passing of a human, but only that of an association nurtured for years. This was the time, she thought, to break this loop of despondency to emancipate her, instead of floundering about in a hollow circle hopelessly.

Amidst the dense fog, a high-speed motor vehicle was approaching soundlessly when Nooma impulsively decided to cross the murky motorway to see the sights of the other side. Did she see Death propelling through the air a short distance away? It was so close! Dreadfully close. What if she stood unmoving, watching the giant thing come within her reach? But she wanted to live. She wanted to live amidst the brume that would fade away eventually. In a flash, she hurled herself towards the kerb. Did that just happen?

To Nooma, it was a concrete moment that denoted a novel purpose and signified her dormant desire. The recurrent laments that walloped her broken heart for a very long time ceased when she realised that her life was too precious to weep over disappearances. She, who aspired to be as strong as a diamond, could not allow herself to grieve over a man who loved her then because he did not love her today. It was the present day that mattered to her, not the romances and woes of yesterday. She fought to keep the muddled past and the weightless future at bay. The leeway in her present awareness enabled her to embrace the thought of starting afresh.

She was not a marionette, anymore.