My serene solitude is at threat. I am convinced there is an intruder in my flat! In fact, not just a mere passer-by but some ‘long time invisible room-mate,’ as I could best put it. As I can not confine such madness to a soul, I left it to echo and swirl in the depths of my mind and fancies. His traces linger around me day and night; the butts of his cigarettes, his liquor and empty bottles of perfume and the cores of apples he leaves behind – mind me, a fruit that frightens me most! I never came to contact with him; I always wake up after he’d lurked there during the night and by dawn vanished, or at sometimes I arrive while the fresh smell of tobacco is still heavily polluting the air — but never of him did I catch sight. Most puzzling is my constant strife to find out the way he enters my flat everyday after I changed the locks a dozen times and wore my keys as a necklace. The bastard even receives his mail on my address– as this supports my hypothesis of an intruder! The letters are addressed to Herr Sie Spiegel, which I assume to be his name. Since I don’t bother throwing them away and stack them in the kitchen to find them open the next day or a few days after. 

Spiegel became my epiphany of Poe’s bone-chilling narration. I discovered that he kept a diary in my desk. He had neatly handwritten foreign scribbles and sketched drawings of mystical creatures and malignant children. As a last resort, succumbing to my madness, I decided to leave him a note, I opened his diary, scribbled today’s date and some greetings and an over-polite invite for the fiend to show up! I woke up the day after and found a reply in the same page! I was disappointed when I read Spiegel’s lines:

“Down he sank in a chair—ran his hands through his hair—

And chanted in mimsiest tones

Words whose utter inanity proved his insanity,

While he rattled a couple of bones. 

…

In the midst of the word he was trying to say,

In the midst of his laughter and glee,

He had softly and suddenly vanished away–

For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.”

Non-sense, how cryptic! 

After two months of confusion and desperate attempts to find out that Spiegel’s identity, I decided to rid myself of him forever. Throughout our interesting acquaintance, I realized how much he liked to eat apples; he leaves a pile of cores carelessly on the table every morning, utterly disturbing my obsessive compulsive disorder and my stressful mysophobia. With rat poison and my fullest killer intent, I poisoned the apples one by one, like a witch so fearful smiled as my deed was done, and, merry and content, I slept!

In what felt like consciousness splashed onto me in a blink, I sprang awake , not where I slept but facing the rising sun within the window across from a kitchen chair — one I was seated upon. A bitten apple was reclining on the table with the traces of fingers that gripped so hard. My chest exceedingly transformed into a burning oven. My limbs were quaking and my vision grew dimmer as my thoughts paced endlessly. Flashes of a stranger’s memory were scattering around like paper and folding away into books that plunge deep into my mind. The ever torn fabric of my memory started to recollect forming a thin tight line. My consciousness slowly faded with the gradual realization of who Sie Spiegel was; as a ill smile malignantly drew itself upon my lips. With that very smile, I sank into the deepest of sleep.

. . .

February 15th, 2007

Split

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