If I Wrote a Book...

If I were to write a book, it would begin something like this:

In his grey coat, black turtleneck and dark jeans, he looked like he had fallen out of a black-and-white animated film in front of a field of brightly coloured tulips. Above all, he seemed two-dimensional: the flowers behind him swayed in all directions in the light breeze, some of them already wilting, their tired, heavy blossoms humbly bent to the ground on stems that could not bear their weight, most of them at least seemingly confidently holding themselves upright as they stretched their necks longingly towards the sun.

He, on the other hand, stood motionless for the moment, giving the illusion of a thin doll, made under duress from cheap collage paper by a primary school child in art education, whose presence adds nothing to the artfully made background, the work of some talented painter. On the contrary, his heavy dark shadow spoilt the idyllic landscape.

To have two dimensions would actually have been a compliment to him, because in every other aspect he was chronically one-dimensional: if, when she was still getting to know him, she thought that there might be something more than complete melancholy hidden in the layers of overpowering perfume and the rows of straight teeth, she soon - but too late - realised that she was mistaken. Everything she had thought of him at first glance - and it wasn't much, he never made a strong impression - turned out to be true. He moved like in an old film: his movements were quick, disjointed and cut off: just like the tone of his voice, which she had learnt in recent months to completely ignore, like her father, who cannot hear the locusts, even if he is standing in the middle of a meadow of tall yellow grass on the hottest evening in June. She flinched: suddenly she noticed that he was looking at her irritably, that he was experiencing just a slight annoyance, betrayed only by the fact that he was speeding up the violent twirling of the palest green tulip stem far and wide between his fingers. She shook her head to collect herself. He accused her of not listening to him, which she denied, having long ago realised that honesty and apologies would not get her far. This reassured him and he went on with his long-winded story about other one-dimensional people who make their own trivial deals and revolve their lives around making themselves look richer than they are. She closed her eyes slightly and let the tulips seemingly blur into a big rainbow mass. She imagined the lumpy monster would suck him in and, covered in brightly coloured spit-up, burst him into a land of cotton candy and pink rabbits. The thought of a barely altered expression on his face, expressing more panic than if he had witnessed an armed robbery, amused her so much that she giggled inaudibly, earning herself three days of reluctant silence in the best sense of the word.

It's just a pity I don't have the imagination for a story.