Hobble

My standard morning at the coffee shop near home, the usual seat. Looking where I normally look I see a hobbling woman struggling along all hunched over, I try to imagine the events of her life, the events that have made her the woman that she is today. I believe there was no event in her life that made her move about as awkwardly as she now does, quite a typical walk for an elderly Singaporean, they so often hobble. After several attempts under the webpage ‘yelp’ on this site I make a new attempt at a story then, a book, I was thinking something more humanistic this time, I’ll get back to aliens soon enough. I imagine…

She is thinking of her 22nd birthday, it is something she frequently recalls. Her husband took her dancing that evening, she never thought she could dance, afterwards it became a habit for them, to dance. Today she struggles to move, something she once did very gracefully, elegantly, while dancing. She was married at 19 to a man she deeply loved, pregnant with the first of their five children at the time of their marriage, she had two children before the birthday she often remembers. Her husband arranged a babysitter for that evening, his mother. That birthday celebration, dancing, was the pinnacle of her life she thought. To dance. She still feels him dancing with her, her husband is still with her despite dying. The religion that she observes is adamant that there is no such thing as death, something she now believes fervently. She always sees her husband and talks with him since his death, it’s as though he still exists. He died of cancer 7 years ago, he physically left her but has remained spiritually.

Just now as I watch her hobbling she drops a newspaper that she was carrying, and kneeling down to pick it up she said thank you to the spirit of her deceased husband, his spirit helped her. A gaunt and very old man. Yesterday she attended her sisters funeral but knows through these experiences that her sister still exists, also because this dead sister told her that she had only gone to the Buddha, gone to the afterlife. Her sister had told her this after she had passed away. Some might think she dreamt of her sister but for this hobbling woman dreams have a reality. In fact for her what she thinks feels real. In an uncommon way her thoughts have taken on a kind of reality, and so when she thinks of her husband he is real to her. When she asks somebody if they heard what her dead husband just said the answer is always no. Many humans experience the dead, there are so many stories of this phenomenon, but we are often too locked into the human perception of this world to perceive the other world, it exists if you close your eyes and feel. She has always perceived this otherness, and loved to dance.

I should just return to my usual subjects of science, space, and entanglement theory… it’s funny where you derive inspiration. The story could describe her life and how she got to think the way that she does, and of course the deterioration of her walking. Let’s call her Agnes…

Update months later, this story has been developed on the page ‘entanglement‘