loneliness on the long road home || mlm, wlw

Ant Mill

Saturday morning, barely noon. Sun piercing through lace curtains that did not do much for providing shade. Varnished paint inside squares of carved wood, reflecting the morning light. Countryside, ocean, tightly pressed townhouses and cobbled streets pouring out from purposeful paintbrush strokes. Cream walls, white plaster trim. Crisp cotton sheets, duck-down duvet, deep blue velvet covers. Cheek pressed heavily into the crook of his arm, waking with the sensation of not having moved much in his sleep; the deep ache of previously presuming an awkward position that had not been remedied throughout the night. Leon sat up quite suddenly and rubbed at his eyes. The sheets pooled at his waist, around the hemline of the shirt he had worn the previous night, unbuttoned except for the very last one that haphazardly held the two points of material closed. It was too bright – he had to squint around his room as he gave his hair an absentminded tussle, yawning deeply, groaning out. A migraine was already beginning to fizz behind his eye sockets, rumble, even, at the base of his spine. His mouth was impossibly dry, throat like sandpaper, and he blindly grappled over to the closest bedside table; hands fussing with the tassels hanging from the embroidered lampshade, before clumsily falling to a half-full glass. Water sloshed over its brim, dampening his bare leg. He huffed, knocked back the remaining inch of water, and fell back into his pillows, abandoning the empty glass to free float through his bedsheets.

He studied one of the paintings hung on the wall at the foot of his bed: sprawling green hills; billowing clusters of trees frozen in time, forever stuck in the silent wind; vibrant sky bordering indigo and whispers of clouds; Turkey, scrawled on the back in messy black ink, right behind the upper-left most cloud, invisible from where Leon was laying but burnt into his memory after looking over it for hours at a time. Briefly, he thought of rising from his cocoon, but there was no need just yet, for he was rather on top of work at the moment. Middle of the term, assignments only recently handed out, students busy buried in the library and behind textbooks. A week of time slowed down. Revisionary classes, barely any new content dolled out. The first-forms, that he took for social anthropology, had been studying the works of Franz Boas, cultural relativism, historical particularism, practical examples, etcetera, etcetera, Leon would rather bang his head into a wall than think too heavily on work, on his students when there was a migraine making his skull feel like it was actively bursting from his scalp, which called for much more of his attention. 

Boasian approaches to anthropology were the basics of the first-form course he taught (Culture and Human History I); the foundation to the foundations, the lenses of which they must use to look through at more complex ideas. His third-forms, whom he had been teaching now for almost a year – picking up after the last professor who had become borderline neurotic and had to retire early – were onto an extremely exciting topic: the intersectionality between sociology and religion, through a Catholic lens. The University was on the rocks about allowing Leon to teach the course, and much persuading and soothing was done on his part to get an OK by the Board – but because of this, he and his third-form sociology class had been dissecting the roots of Catholicism, its subsequent movements around Europe, why and how it had dug so deeply into a multitude of cultures. He often felt he was traipsing around scornful eyes in staff meetings, harsh whispers about his 'insolent attitude towards the Bible', but snide comments like these rolled off his shoulders when he stepped into a classroom full of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed students hanging off every word from his lectures. Because of the engagement his class deployed, the Board allowed him to continue (despite a few complaints), supported also by a plethora of other professors in the sociology department who turned their noses up at the protests of his more radical classes. But school politics be damned, he was to have a calm day to nurse his hangover.

He dozed for a little while longer, basking in the welcomed appearance of the sun, shooting a leg out from beneath the covers to try soak up any extra warmth. When he reached out for his cigarettes, his hand came up empty, and he shot his head up to awkwardly turn side-to-side: they were nowhere to be seen on either bedside table. Reluctantly, he pulled himself out of bed, cold, disgruntled, woozy, bare feet sinking in the green and gold patterns of a Persian carpet he had sequestered for himself at the auction of an elderly antiquer. Leon wobbled over to a chair by the windowsill – floral embroidered upholstery, dark walnut frame – where he had draped his suit jacket a few hours earlier before falling unconscious. Wrinkled fabric, empty breast pocket. He leaned heavily onto the arms of the little evil chair, hung his head between his shoulders, head pounding, nauseated, skin buzzing just below the surface; he needed a smoke and he needed to put the kettle on.