Mood: The mess in the room is spectacular. Weeks, maybe even months of accumulated filth lie everywhere. Dishes have grown mould. Curtains are stained everywhere. Clothes are strewn on the floor. Pictures, once hung, now broken on the floor. Pictures, still hang, with broken frames and missing faces. In the middle of the room there is a chair, where a perfectly poised pinky finger sips tea from a cup, ‘lovely, just lovely.’
They first time you told them you never loved yourself they gave you a list. It was a strange list written on a small parchment. The items seemed strange to your person. But they seemed to know things. And you wanted to learn to listen.
The second time, they told you a story of time traveller. In the story the traveller was given a seed that would slowly birth into a traveller like them. The task, it seemed, was to find whether the dimension of time had an end. Carrying the seed, the traveller was to travel into the future as quickly as possible. As the seed got heavier it would begin to feed on the traveller’s energy. At critical mass traveller was to give the new traveller a seed and, with one final push, fling them into the future that the search might continue.
You were not sure if you were the traveller, the seed or time.
The third time they sent you to the forest. There, they said, you would have to look for the bark of the mugumo that refused to fall when struck. Legend has it that it was there that the spirit came from the shadows and boomed, ‘you shall not take what is not yours.’ The tree, that grew weaker over the years because of neocolonialisation, still had a few branches left. But it was buried deep in the forest. And no one was really sure how to get there or whether it could really be found.
You’ve been walking ever since.