Narrative Practice outputs

DAY 1.

SCORE FOR NATASHA BROWN'S ASSEMBLY

ONE PAGE OF WRITING INSPIRED BY THE "TEMPLATE" OF NATASHA BROWN'S ASSEMBLY

She puts on the brown shoes with faded noses.

She will never throw them out, they were her father’s first good gift.

She slams the stained glass door behind her.

I walk with big steps, in a rush to get this over with. At the postal collection point, I hand in the package with a big return label glued onto it. The woman behind the desk scans the barcode and says I have to pay more than the label accounts for. I say I just printed what they sent me. She says it doesn’t matter, it weighs more than the label accounts for.

When Dan said he was jealous of my calmness cause he couldn’t remember the last time he felt at peace, I wanted to break his bones. But I didn’t. He might not understand me, but I understand him all too well.

I ask her how much more, she says two euros. I say that’s fine, can I pay by card please? She says it doesn’t work that way. That I have to create a new label. I walk out of the store, leaving behind the package and the label and the 50 euros worth of refund money and the woman behind the desk.

Before I was living in this house, the one with the stained glass door and the deep windowsills and the morning sun and the modern kitchen, I was renting the attic room of a young family on the outskirts of the city. I had to share the bathroom with the children, twelve and fourteen they were, but had a little kitchenette on my own floor. It wasn’t much more than a microwave and kettle, but that is all I thought one could need at that point. Then I got a job, a real job that pays real money and offers real benefits. At that job, I couldn’t possibly tell people that I was living in someone else’s attic. I lied about having a nice apartment till I actually found one, and before I knew it, I started believing that I, too, deserved such a place, that I needed such a place. It’s a feeling that only very rarely makes place for an incomprehensible lack. Moments where I try to hear if the bathroom is already being used before the realisation sets in. Even though it wasn’t my family, it was still a family.

I wash my coffee cup for too long. I am trying to hear the conversation going on at the lunch table, they are not in my team, but some names of shared bosses get dropped. A quick rinse would have sufficed, I wonder when they will notice that the tap still hasn’t stopped running. The water turns hotter and when my hand is almost burning, I finally turn it off.

If only there would have been more of us, more like me. Friends, siblings, cousins. If we would have been with more, it might have felt like enough.

You wake up in a mirrored world and every time you try to use your right arm, your left arm raises.

Back at my desk, Dan comes over. I ask him how his morning meeting was, the one above my pay grade. While he explains in intricate detail who said what and made which faces, I think about what I will cook tonight.