Spider

I stay in a damp, one room apartment with a spider. The room, even a year back, was nothing to write home about: it has its usual drawbacks. Its too small, it doesn't receive enough light, there's a smell of something rotting coming from under somewhere but I never found the cause. All it has in it is a bed, and a table with a light on it. And my room mate.

I don't like my room mate. He drinks too much, he doesn't bathe nearly as often as he should, and on top of that, he reads four books at a time simultaneously. He has too much hair on his body. I don't mind the hair. I don't mind his eating habits either, for he cleans up after he's done and everything. I just don't like it that he can read so much, so quickly, so effortlessly, while I have so much trouble parsing words nowadays.

Yes, come to think of it, I don't mind him drinking or not taking baths either.

But time does things to a room. Maybe its not so much a room, as the people staying in it, but I'm convinced that what might start off as residing safely within someone's imagination, soon begins to manifest itself in actual physical reality.

I don't know what spiders think. One would assume its all flies, and webs and bloody instinct. But I'm not very sure at all. In fact, why simply spiders, and that too, ones that read? I don't think its possible to ever determine what anyone thinks, unless they make something out of it.

My roommate has been stringing books on the walls, of late, on webs. They hang ominously, carcasses of reads sucked dry in a matter of a few hours. They have been building up for a year, and that too, so very gradually that it was only yesterday that I realized that my dank room has changed, been given something of a make-over. This is what it looks like now, with us in it.

Spiders don't speak very well. They just tend to read...a lot. But my roommate told me yesterday that I can add to the decor if I like. Its the first thing he's said to me in ages. But I think I'll take his advice.