The Third

An enclave of buildings…at its center is a rectangular courtyard floored with crimson bricks…lining each of the courtyard’s lengths are lanes of  black-beautiful benches made of cold steel…at the last bench of one lane I sought to bask under the sun- a solitary refuge…Or so I thought.

Twenty paces from where I was, a child is meticulously tinkering with two pieces of clothing etherized upon the adjacent beautiful black bench. This little girl wearing light colored dress is alone and presumably is like me- waiting, in my case, for something, in her case, for someone.

It was mid afternoon, and by virtue of a structure the sun warmed only the selfish spectator leaving the spectacle in a shade. Like some children when playing alone, the child was unmindful of anything else aside from her masterpiece. This opus magnum is made up of three garments – one in pink the other in beautiful  black, which she, whose back is turned on me,  would switch places many and many a time under the last garment.   It seemed that this little girl was trying to foam the steel bench apropos making it a bed. It would be perfect for a ciesta…Or so I thought.

Behold the handmade of the child as she finally turned around to face her audience - a made-up baby.  Very lucid, the pink cloth being the infant cooped up by the black-beautiful cloth. And she cradles the baby with guarding tiger eyes that scan the perimeter from right to left(thankfully it missed me). This made-up mother of a child appeared to be just 5 years old perhaps even younger.

Is such the essence of a woman? to be a mother? Like ponies walking just moments after birth, is motherhood the lifeblood of woman that she knows it so early in life, and later on desires it so much? Perhaps if we were to make a survey on women to determine whether they would prefer to be a mother or a wife they would prefer the former.

Back to the courtyard.

Now her guardian returned and was quite unmoved seeing the child in such a fashion, neither did her arrival disturb the guarding seriousness of the little girl. She was still cradling her baby.

At this point, I decided to do a Robert Downey Holmes Jr Jr. My profoundest gratitude and admiration goes to the generous and honored lady who treated me to that movie… It was great.

So here goes.  

The serious expression of the child is mirrored by her guardian, we could speculate that they are related(perhaps she is her mother) or  she could be a person she spends most of her time with.

For the cradling (her delicate arms shackled his impoverished body), I surmise that back at their home there is a baby.  This other baby could be her sister. The nonchalance  displayed by the mother(if she is her mother) over the little girl in light colored dress  could stem from the fact that she has a younger sibling- a baby commanding more emotional investment from the mother thus limiting the emotion for the little girl in light colored dress(whose arms provided warmth to the baby).

Or to put it simply, the family is a proud owner of a TV(was the child ever allowed to change channels?) or other similar producers of complicated images , images like Boy Abunda and Ellen Degeneres  or birds that cannot fly because they are too young- or tied together…

Now the women are leaving.  The shade is almost upon my cold steel bench but not the flying birds somewhere.

An enclave of buildings…at the hypothetical center is a rectangular courtyard of crimson… lining each of the courtyard’s  lengths are lanes of black-beautiful  benches of cold steel…at the last bench  of one lane I chose to sit. The wait was not wasted. It will soon be over?...