The walls are cold
The walls are cold. On some days, strangers are waiting around the corner to be bumped into. I imagine one of them with a half-smoked cigarette in his right hand, while his left is strong and steady enough to clench into a fist. A fist of a woman’s fragrant hair, maybe, her face to the brick in some filthy back alley. On some days, it’s a car that’s waiting. And all it takes is one smooth swerve for everything to start over.
She colored a section of her hair at some point, as I did to mine years ago. But she wore it a lot differently, and with much tenacity. I still do a double-take when I think it’s her on the platform, stepping inside the train at the 10th station, or pausing in front of a shop window to check her reflection. She always made me think of Holly Golightly admiring the display through the glass at Tiffany’s on Fifth Avenue. She was a bright and shiny new person, she said, whenever she changed her look, her habits, her pursuits. But in my mind, she was always the same, no matter what she added to herself, or what she attempted to take away. Wisdom like that sticks to the back of your mouth like honey, especially when you’ve known someone like her for much too long.
You’re never truly a new person. You’re born and you live and you die as you are, your essence intact despite everything that you’ve chosen for yourself, everything that has happened to you, and everything that went wrong along the way. Your perspective changes though. You see, there’s a window that looks out at the skyline, a door that opens out into a hallway, a vent that’s big enough to kick out of before you end up on a ledge, without the ways and means to go back. It’s a long way down.
And gravity is economical.
Sometimes, when I’m at a party or with people of an indeterminate demographic or even with friends whose ways of coping with loss and alienation enamor me, I think this: it’s a long way down. And also: the walls are cold.
But we, meaning you and I, we’re together, despite the dip in temperature. We’re here because nothing makes sense if I’m not where you are. Every time I look at you, it’s the little things that bring you to life. And for me to remember you, the way you are, the way you’ll always be—that’s what I’m here for.
On Tuesdays, there’s a group that meets at the stairwell on a certain floor in a certain building. I know because I’ve been invited. They all talk a lot, and they know each other intimately through their stories, which are often about surviving the most horrific trauma. The mean age is 37. There’s only one man there, and he’s not proud of that, he tells me. He says there should be more of them. It’s through him that I know these things. On most days, he leaves pieces of himself everywhere. He’ll call the office at night to ask if he had forgotten something here or there or some such. There’s a box of shins in the pantry, I’ll say, trying to make him laugh. Oddly enough, it will be exactly what he’s looking for. What I said to him, I mean, not the box of shins.
At the bookshop, someone meets someone else between the shelves of Proust and the dirty novels. A dark curtain in the sky parts delicately, and a shaft of light shines on a fraction of the unknown world. For a few precious seconds, you see no beauty in it, only truth. My friend isn’t really on the platform, stepping inside the train at the 10th station, or pausing in front of a shop window to check her reflection. She isn’t really my friend at all. Actually, she isn’t anyone who exists. She’s someone you just read off something I just wrote, someone you wondered about for a while, someone you felt sorry for, perhaps, right before I told you about the man who was hurt terribly, one who can still laugh at a really lame joke. This is called perspective.
Right now, as I’m typing this, the snack bar downstairs closes. The counter is slowly emptied of its remains. There was never any consciousness of that emptiness until it was created, until it was filled, and until it was left.
I’m waiting for something. For a car to hit. For a heart to start beating. For the cold on the walls to melt. Anything.