Disintegration or; Poor Pensioners Dystopia

A certain smell, like; musty towels and dairy on the wrong side of the best before date.

A soiled ambience enveloping the area, so that when you walk through the doors you feel poverty in your bones and move quickly for fear of catching whatever it is they’ve got.

Stringy hair, unnatural colour and feel. Acne scarred and wrinkled, these marks cover every inch of skin on their faces, worn like badges displaying their lewd lives.

The eyes; defunct and confused, almost like they don’t know what they’re doing there from one minute to the next.

The walk; spiritless and stiff, as if one caustic step in the wrong aisle will set in motion a catastrophic event they could never bounce back from.

Standing too close, they send something like a shudder down your spine, causing you to twitter involuntarily, quickly; regaining composure in seconds.

Almost nefarious and baneful, the aged bourgeois come here for their daily bread, their daily outing into the world that forgot them a long time ago.

This is Rosemary’s Centre, a mall for the antiquated and amongst said bourgeois is Marsha Pool.

Ms Pool has grey hair restored to its former glory: blonde. She has sallow skin and a lumpy stomach, a terrible taste in fashion, which was never quite in fashion. She hosts bland eyes and thin lips, no desirable or distinguishable features to speak of or look at, now or then. Then, when she was young, when she had the love and infatuated heart of an artist, when she mattered to a multitude of people; an aspiring artist herself, before she came to realise she was not good enough, not dedicated enough and never would be, before she decided to study instead, she longed for logic and mathematics. She missed just knowing instead of wondering, guessing.

Marsha studied architecture. She finished and got a job, but she never felt the joy again, of paint on the floor and permanently stained on her socks, the satisfaction of pencil marks on her fingers and a completed drawing in front of her.

She never made a fortune, she just scraped by and she lost the heart of the artist, the man and herself. He chased after her relentlessly for years and eventually gave into her disappearing light and moved on and when she decided she really did love him she found him in the arms of a beautiful siren with tattoos and long, writhing hair darker than her lover’s eyes. Marsha took him for granted all those years; just assuming once she calmed down she could run back into his arms and everything would be as it was, which was never really anything too great to begin with. Marsha led him on, she wanted him to be alone and pine for her whilst she was out with a different man every week, searching for a soul mate.

When they were alone he could have sworn she loved him. And maybe she did, but not the way she should have.

Marsha never forgot the way the vamp touched her former sweetheart and still, as she pushes her half empty trolley down the toiletry aisle, she missed the mawkish way they used to hold hands and talk.
Even though, on her part, it was never anything too special then, now; now it was a life missed. Something she once owned and wanted desperately to have back. It was an old, oily regret.

An extreme case of nostalgia seeped into her attention together with the bitter disappointment and regret that inevitably follows thrown away love.
The various states of discomposure and solicitude, the rerum, Ms Pool felt it all, daily.

And so the years went by. She worked hard, she had many friends who slowly started marrying one another, she had many men who eventually all left her bed and took their razors and hair gel with them.
Marsha thought she had loved these men, each in a different way. In fact, some, she found, even measured up to the artist and after hearing news of his engagement to, she learnt the sirens name but found she could never say it, Luna, (Marsha wondered if that was indeed her birth name, it seemed to her a little odd and she decided that her real name was something plain like Jane or Jessica.) Marsha decided she may even be ready to settle down and bear children, only to find the man of the week amble out the door, sprinting miles between them.

Until eventually here she was, Marsha Pool, in the middle of the fruit and vegetable aisle at a decrepit mall in her last years.
Versed, a veteran at wasted time. Almost nearly senile. Obsolete.

Autumn: leaves committing mass suicide all over the country. Ms Pool felt like joining them.

She longed to paint and feel alive again. She wished she could right all of her wrongs; do it all again. She didn’t feel, au contraire, she walked around mindlessly, like a robot with gravity stricken breasts, speaking in tones that did not look to disguise her hurt and wearing makeup as crazy as the clown prince of crime and Batman’s arch-enemy because, it seemed to her, anything was better than the way she looked, naturally.

Alone with an age-softened mind, with memories to look back on and cry over but nothing solid to touch, Marsha Pool paid for her apples and shampoo with coupons and a wry smile.