The Honesty Box

I like playing in empty rooms, so while the world and its fugly mate are busy on facebook/twitter/whatever i'm going to use this silent void to tell a little story about me..........

The Honesty Box.

Part 1.

It sits on the shelf in my study now, the Honesty Box, a shelf I couldn't have reached when I was the boy that made it more than twenty five years ago.
I've got one of those sparse studies you see in catalogues, walls painted ice blue, spot lights, lots of chrome and glass. It was all my wife's idea 'Think of that room as your mind Charles, think of how your body needs room to excersise, imagine how relaxed you'll feel in a room tuned to you Zen.'
We still keep in touch, mainly to settle who's paying what and when while we wait for the divorce to come through, Laura phones me once every day. She does it because despite the fact she found her own zen with a health food specialist called Trey she still has a hard wired dedication to her own saintliness, Laura cannot see herself as anything less than a victim of my inability to embrace the cheesecloth hem of Saint Lentil; patron saint of thirty something's everywhere that believe a stick of celery will stave off the march of time.
I still love Laura in a kind of apologetic way, but the attractive love we experienced when we met kind of faded like jeans do from wash after wash, now i have a dutiful love toward her (I won't say 'sisterly' because that's kind of the wrong vibe, but you get what i mean) it's a tollerant love.
So i'm sitting here in my 'mind room' eagerly anticipating the day I can change it into 'my room' - but I don't want to bruise Laura's Karma/Zen thing until the divorce is done, but on that day.....oh happy day! - and i'm looking across at the lone glass shelf on the shear face of an ice blue wall, like a ledge for suicidle spiders to leap from onto the hard white tiles below, maybe a spider and a fly will make a lovers pact and leap to their deaths to escape the wraith of their.......God I need to redecorate this room soon.
The Honesty Box. It sits on that shelf between a picture of my parents and a slim white vase holding two white tulips, and in this room of sparcity and neatness it's cracked paint and rusty lock draw me in. Almost two decades of wet and dry summers have seeped into the cracks and warped the teak lid, a little. The key? It was lost, but the lock is broken so no matter.
I walk over and take down the little box - it's about half the size of a shoe box - I hold it in the same hands that made it all those years ago, the same but different, and in that moment I realise that 'different' kind of sneeked up on me, soaked into me a little everyday. In the chrome back plate of the shelf I look at my reflection, blurred a little by the not perfect mirror of the steel I can see the boy in there, a little, a little ghost of me. I sit back down and let my mind wander in it's room........