November 18th

November brought the first snow. Teresa by now had stopped counting the times she thought she was ‘finally getting better’ only to fall back into old habits one or two days later. Overall the only improvement was that nowadays, she didn’t spend all her time lying in a bed next to mouldering leftover food because she didn’t have the energy to get up, because Wisdom made this kind of behaviour impossible.

Not just Teresa was influenced by November’s melancholy though. It was, surprisingly, also I who, in a moment of weakness, took an action I promised myself not to — by meddling in my sister’s affairs, putting my small nose somewhere it didn’t belong.

It happened on a Saturday, after I had talked to Time. Each encounter with her made me feel a certain kind of longing; She made me have a bad conscience for being wasteful with my life and caused me to want to take action, in a way.

Teresa was spending her morning on her bed in my sister’s home. Her alarm had rang a long time ago, but today she wasn’t scheduled to be out with the Future, so she’d ignored it.

It was nearing noon, and while she had woken up hours ago, she also had no reason nor motivation to get up, until she heard the person who had spent the night with Wisdom leave the neighbouring room. After waiting a few more minutes, Teresa slowly dragged herself over her mattress and left her room. Without knocking, and still wearing her night shirt, she entered Wisdom’s room, who was lying on her bed in her underwear, reading a book. For a moment, Teresa found solace in the thought that Wisdom, too had trouble getting up, only to realize that that woman had probably already eaten breakfast, woken up the Future and had sex today.

The moment Wisdom saw Teresa, she smiled and sat up arching her back to present her new cream-coloured lingerie with carmine embroidery, ribbons and flowers.

“Pretty,” Teresa mumbled sleepily, opening the big wall cabinet taking up a big portion of the room. Wisdom had cleared a section of it and put some of the Future’s clothing in it for her to wear.

Teresa felt ashamed for it. Because… Teresa had never actually officially moved in with them. She maintained that she didn’t want to take the stuff from her home here, because then she’d feel like a parasite, but at the same time, each evening, when she was trying to get herself to return home, it would just take a little bit of convincing from Wisdom and she’d end up spending another night with them anyway.

Wisdom had at first offered her own clothing, but it didn’t fit, as Teresa was taller but thinner. Thus, for weeks now, Teresa had almost exclusively worn the Future’s clothes, most of which were old and worn.

“I’ll leave soon, by the way,” Wisdom said. “You’ll have the house for yourself today. Enjoy!”

Teresa couldn’t help but feel a bit relieved. Being alone for a while was destressing. After finding a set of clothes to wear, she went to the bathroom to brush her teeth. Should she take a shower? On the other hand, it seemed like a waste of energy if she was just going to lie in bed all day anyway.

Procrastinating on the decision, Teresa went back to her own room, lied down on her bed and started doomscrolling on her smartphone. Twitter showed a bunch of depressing takes, she skimmed through some new studies, checked weather forecast and changed the status on her messenger, which for weeks had been ‘just let the world end’ to ‘Saw my roommate in her underwear today, and now I feel like jogging but it’s too cold outside, fml.’

She didn’t do any of that with any enthusiasm whatsoever. It just served to distract her from her thinking too much, which almost always led to depressing results.

In the end she just threw her phone into a cushion, turned around with a wail and glanced at the wall clock. With a little shock, she realized it was already 4 pm.

She was still wearing her nightgown. She had forgotten the little stack of new clothes for today on the small chair in the bathroom.

Outside, dark clouds obscured the sky.

She was alone in the house now. She hadn’t actually noticed the Future leaving, but with how immersed she’d been in her phone, that wasn’t a surprise. She also hadn’t eaten anything today, so she decided to walk down to the kitchen.

For a second, she considered actually making food, but then just opened the closet containing all the sweets and pulled out a bar of chocolate, only to notice it was coffee chocolate which she hated, so she threw it back in. After opening a few more places, she found vegan melt chocolate in the Future’s baking drawer and ended up feeding on that.

It was already so late in the day… The decision she had postponed earlier about showering seemed pretty much made now. It’s not as if she was going to do anything productive today anyway, right? Instead, she imagined herself loafing around on her bed for the rest of the day, too, but…

As she chewed on the chocolate void any sense of enjoyment, she suddenly realized that her bed offered her nothing, and even walking back up there seemed like a waste. No matter what she did or where she was, she’d feel empty and bored beyond relief anyway.

By now, she had almost gotten nauseous from the amount of tasteless, brittle chocolate she’d devoured. She got up and walked around in the empty house, entering all the rooms and finding nothing of note. On good days, she’d lie on the couch in the living room, reading. It was a comfortable place — the heart of the house. One time, she had plunked around on the grand piano that was standing next to the glass wall, however, the sound it made was incredibly loud. Even though nobody ever played on the instrument, it was always clean and dusted, and sometimes, she’d see the Future tuning it.

The desk of the Future hadn’t changed over the last few months either; the only update was that by now, Teresa suspected all the diagrams and drawings to be blueprints of the Future’s daughter. The daughter… it had been a while since Teresa was in the basement… turning around, she left the living room and took the stairs down.

It was very cold in the cellar. Teresa’s thighs cooled down quickly, as she hadn’t even gotten dressed yet.

The room still inspired the same awe in her as it had the first time. To be honest, the effect only increased, as now, the basin was almost completely filled. The countless tears shimmered in the refractions of the low ambient lights.

The Future was still gathering her materials, but as things went, this wasn’t going to take much longer, Teresa reckoned. Soon, the Future would start compiling the body itself.

As she fell into thought beholding the amazing work of the Future, Teresa started shivering. The cold crept further and further into her body.

It was depressing. Each and any of these tears contained the Future’s blood and effort which she was tirelessly spending to one day reach her goal. And… a while ago Teresa had even arrogantly calculated how impossible the task to fill the basin would be… She cringed at herself.

She wondered: If she wasn’t this worthless, what could she have done in that whole timespan? Instead of sitting around, pitying herself, doing nothing at all. But instead she was hiding from this world, hiding within all these empty minutes of her life. Hiding from this world she could neither change nor accept.

‘Oh, whatever,’ she thought, slapping her open hand against the cold stone wall. Her feet were burning from the cold. How comfortable it would be to now go back to her bed and bury herself under three blankets… But as she went back up and eventually entered the floor in the first stock, she hesitated as her gaze fell on the open door of the bathroom.

Undoing her nightgown, she walked towards it, threw the piece of clothing to the ground, locked the door from the inside behind herself and turned on the shower to wait for the water to warm up.

In the meantime, she let water from the tap to clean her face. The mirror reflected her tired gaze that was squashed by her own apathy and her dry lips. Even though she barely left the house, her skin had kept a darker teint. Her black, curly hair frizzled around her face in a ridiculous fashion.

A while later, without closing the tap, she turned around to enter the shower, as the water burned along her chilled muscles. She liked the feeling, even though it hurt. For minutes, she just stood there. Eventually, she got dizzy from the heat, so she sat down on the floor of the shower cubicle, where the water was marginally cooler.

She let out a big sob. At first, she wasn’t sure what was happening, but then, as she rubbed one of her eyes she realized she was crying, her tears being washed away by the droplets of the shower.

This was the only place where she could. The Future wouldn’t suddenly appear and rob her of these tears, and nobody was there who could take notice of her chagrin.

She sat there for a long time without even gathering a single clear thought. Some distant clank from far outside finally brought her back into reality. Only now she actually recognized where she was. The water still ran down her body, but the room was filled with complete darkness by now.

‘I should go home,’ she thought. She got up, washed her hair and body, and only then actually felt comfortable in her skin again. She felt a bit lighter.

She blow-dried her hair, got dressed, even put on some make-up. Now, she actually almost resembled the accomplished person who had given lectures at university until over one year ago.

As she left the bath, it was already almost 7 pm. In Wisdom’s room, she got her mantle, and she saw a light blue bobble hat. She still missed her knitted long beanie that had gotten lost on the school yard back then, when Wisdom had allegedly ‘saved’ her from that mysterious small girl. Now, she had to make do with this other hat.

After she had also gotten herself a scarf, she left out into the bone-chilling cold. Immediately, she buried her hands into her large mantle pockets. Buried beneath that many layers of clothes, she felt like a small fortress marching through the snow.

Walking down the street, she thought about whether she should take the bus or walk. But at the stop, she realized she would have to wait for fifteen minutes, so she passed on that. She had no interest standing around doing nothing in this cold air.

That walk soon left her no choice but to face some uncomfortable thoughts she normally banished within her subconscious. How much longer was she willing to be a burden to Wisdom and the Future? The only reason she hadn’t long-since left was that the both of them treated her staying at that house as the most natural thing in the world. But… it wasn’t.

One thing Teresa did was to regularly hide money in a rice glass jar in the kitchen of the Future. Of course, Teresa had tried giving it to Wisdom personally, but she’d declined.

What exactly caused those two to take care of her?

As she thought about how little she had to offer, Teresa got a bit more depressed, but this time, she was at least sad, which to her was an upgrade to her usual complete apathy.

Eventually, Teresa arrived at the multi-stock apartment building she lived in. The stairs inside had been overhauled and renovated since her last visit. Teresa wondered if they had, on that occasion, just renovated away her apartment as well.

Immediately upon entry, Teresa was greeted by the catastrophic chaos inside her flat which now already started at the corridor. The garbage now seemed a lot more disgusting to her after not having seen it for so long.

She climbed over the clothes, half-emptied cardboard boxes, unsorted documents, letters, magazines and other stuff she had used and then discarded wherever.

In the living room, on the ground in front of her bedside cabinet she saw an uncorrected batch of student tests as well as an open pill box whose insides had sprinkled over the carpet and partly into a heap of clothing. She banished the thought of visiting the doctor again as soon as it came.

Walking through her flat, she picked up all the pieces of clothing on the ground she liked to wear, to take them back to the house of the Future. She had come to the conclusion that she was going to feel like a parasite regardless of whether she decided to move her stuff in with them or wear the clothes of the Future, so she chose the less pathetic option and just gathered some of her stuff.

She dumped all these clothes into her washing machine and ran it. Now, all she had to do was wait. Maybe it would have been better to wash the clothes at the Future’s place, but Teresa had not yet found their washing machine and Wisdom always did all the laundry herself. Maybe it was on one of the lower floors in the Future’s shed? Wisdom couldn’t possibly wash everything by hand, right?

Now she’d just have to carry the damp clothing to their house somehow and then hang it to dry somewhere… While having these trivial thoughts, Teresa’s gaze fell upon a row of framed documents hanging on the corridor wall between kitchen and bathroom. Her high school graduation certificate, her degree certificate, the record of her finished doctoral dissertation, as well as her habilitation certificate… And until not too long ago, as an act of swagger, Teresa used to sign documents with her full name, which also hung on the wall in golden letters:

PROF. DR. RER. NAT. HABIL. TERESA RAPHAELLA MARGOT SELENE HARGROVE

Teresa laughed as she looked at this comically large monstrosity. She hadn’t seen her full name in months. Nowadays she just used T. Hargrove wherever she went.

Suddenly, the sound of her doorbell disrupted her train of thought. For a moment, she just stood there, who it might be that could attempt to visit her on this day at this time, but then came to the conclusion that the only way to find out would be to answer.

“Yes, please?” she asked over the intercom, but she didn’t get a reply. It dawned on her who it might be, so she just pressed the button to open the door and opened the door to her apartment a slit wide and went back to her living room. At this point she wondered how the Future and Wisdom used to be able to just enter her apartment at will… did they have a key? It wouldn’t surprise Teresa if the Future had stolen her key on some occasion. Either way, it wasn’t like any of that had ever concerned her in the first place, and now it didn’t matter anymore.

For a second, she contemplated whether she should attempt to tidy up her apartment in a desperate attempt before the Future arrived, but… that really didn’t seem necessary at all.

As you can probably imagine from the way I’ve been writing, it’s not the Future at all who eventually ended up entering Teresa’s apartment. I slowly pushed open the door and trampled over all the things on the floor, then turned into the living room, eliciting a short, muffled scream from Teresa as she unexpectedly saw me, and I made her regret her choice of not tidying up when I wrote onto my chalkboard:

THIS PLACE IS DISGUSTING.