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Too Many Miles
Down in the Dirt (v130) (the July/Aug. 2015 Issue)




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The Window Over the Street

Antonio Marques

    I’m agoraphobic. Since a very young age, contemplating going outside, even if just over the front door, is enough to make me sweaty and tremble in a way that I have to sit down and think happy thoughts of closed spaces. The insides of a vault is the one working for me now. Steel walls, so thick that no fire, water, wind or the scrutinies of strangers can penetrate; and just there for me to reach. Walls meant to be touched with my fingertips and caressed, much more protective than those uterine walls before I was expelled to the anguishes of the world. Yes, that’s it. Think about vaults. Think about darkness. I can’t be touched there.
    Am I crazy? I don’t think so. I rather look at it as a deep psychological disorder rather than simple craziness. So much more political correct. We all have to indulge ourselves in some ways.
    Because I’ve mentioned vaults, dark places only to be opened by a few, you may think I like the dark. You must assume my room, the one I still haven’t talked about, to be a dark place, full of aphotic corners and shadows reigning over it. How untrue. I like the light, the sun, the brightness. If I could, I’d have a permanent star right in the middle of the room bathing me with light at every moment. But I’m not a god, just a normal man who, by accident of fate or genes, tends not to like open spaces. I have no sun in the middle of my room. I just have a window... You might have your life, full of joys or sorrows, your family, your pony if you like, but I have a window, and this not even you can take from me.
    This window is my world. I live near it, with it, and above all through it. My days are spent looking out this window and into your world, thus my preference for light - night and darkness tend to limit my view. Do you feel my eyes upon you every time you walk out your door? What about every time you get home, do you still feel me here, looking, remembering, smiling or crying with you? I don’t think so. I’m here but I’m blurred. A foggy remnant of society that is just there without a use and therefore without a cause. But that is, in the end, my cause: to be here and looking. Making you know that somehow, someone might be looking at you. The tiny little hairs on the back of your neck, do they rise when I tell you this?
    But my life can’t just be looking out of the window in an Orwellian Big Brother style. And I don’t have a Thought Police to know what you are thinking. But I have a friend, a powerful ally that is always with me, within me. With this imaginary friend of mine, together, we create the lives that we will never live. Together we own you. We break your life apart and give you a new one. What do you do for a living? Accountant? Professor? Movie star? Nonsense... You are what I want you to be. You can be trash or treasure, famous or fool, miserable or magnificent. You still are what I want you to be. You live exactly as I say you live. What is more important than your life? The life I give you. Think about that.
    I woke up early in the morning. While drinking my coffee some birds started singing in the old oak, one of the many oaks lining the street. Birds singing always make me smile. I can empathize with those dogs Pavlov used as I feel just like one when a bird sings, smiles instead of saliva. I glance at my window. What shall you be today?
    The day woke up embraced by a light fog, not too deep to hinder my view but still one of those misty days in which the color gray is the ruler. In these early hours, with the sun just starting to pour its color palette to the east, the street is still quiet. Just a few people walk by my window on their routes to early jobs or home from their late jobs. One of them is a young mother, maybe nineteen or twenty from her looks. What catches my attention is the stroller she pushes. Everything else fades from my eyes as if a black paper has been put on the window with just a little circle cut out where the little stroller is. Blue in color, dark blue like the night that just passed. A few baby toys emerge from the depths of the blankets that cover the life I know is inside. I almost hold my breath and then... yes, there it is. A bundle of pink flesh punctured by dark eyes and a gaping mouth. That’s the life I want now.
    The stroller goes far already, pushed by the mother on her way to her way, but that image is still with me. What is like to be a baby? I don’t remember it so I’ll have to recur to my friend, the one I talked about before. Being always warm, that’s what he tells me, that’s what it must be like. The body is your master. It has strange demands that must be fulfilled at once. The best part, if you are the baby, you don’t have to do it. All you have to do is cry. I am that baby now. I feel the warmth of all those baby blankets and sleep creeps over me. The sounds of the world are strange but of no concern of mine: a car passes by, a bird sings and I smile. Strange, my mind is empty of thoughts, just feelings. I want to cry my dry cry just to announce that I’m alive but the body doesn’t answer me. A baby bottle is raised just in front of my face and my body answers with satisfaction. The flavor of the liquid descending through my throat is exquisite. I’m happy. And then all I want is to sleep. No worries in my baby life, I am my own center and the center of the world. Better, I am the world for only I exist for me. When I come back into my room, to my old self, I cry. Rivulets of tears bathe my face. But behind those tears there is the smile. This is what I live for inside these walls. This was a life I owned as mine, even if just for moments, and released it back to its freedom.
    I lie in bed and try to imagine happy images. What would my life have been if I wasn’t crazy? The cold sheets are no comfort but nowadays something rarely is, except my window, my true world. Time goes by...
    The birds sing again and everything seems better. How wrong can I be! Everything is the same as yesterday, the same as years in the past. Except my window. A new world comes up though it every hour and as days, months and years speed by, it’s the only thing I can’t get tired of. The green wallpaper in the room is old. The four chairs surrounding the wooden table are old. I am old. But not my window. That is new at every moment. I sit again near it. Outside, the day has renewed itself. Shy sunrays make an appearance and I can see more people. The ones that went by already passed and now it’s the time of the young on their way to schools. A recollection of the baby comes to mind: what if one of this teenagers in their branded clothes and wild hair could be the baby grown? As I look at them walking, my attention is focused on a girl. Fourteen? She is a little far from the group in front, lost in her thoughts or just plainly absent from what surrounds her. I want to be her. What does a young girl feel? Confusion is what pops into my mind. Isn’t it confusion what all teenagers feel? I look more closely and I see signs of both hope and despair. Perhaps she just longs to be accepted by the group, or a hidden love for someone there is distorting the way she contemplates the world. How everything can look so pink and yet so gray. An instant makes the day: the smile of the one, a favorite song on the radio, a new pair of jeans, the taste of an ice-cream... Or a moment destroys the day: to be ignored, to be laughed at, to feel confused at what you are and what you want. You choose. What makes you happy in that moment is what you live for or what destroys you. I choose life for what it is: the pain, the confusion, the misery of everyday rarely punctuated by a defining moment of happiness. I don’t want to be her anymore. This time the tears aren’t for joy but utter agony. Signals of my deranged mind without ambition. The sun is brighter than ever on my window, almost blinding me, and turning the outside into a marvelous, joyful, awe-inspiring painting. But I am inside as I will ever be. My room is my coffin. By my own choice? By my sick mind? By my feeble self? I long to go outside and finally look at the birds that sing, see the leaves falling in these Autumn days, feel the wind blowing and drying the tears I know I would shed.
    In an act of despondency I run around. A mute scream in my lungs emerges to my mouth but is arrested there. Why can’t I even scream anymore? The jar with the plastic flowers gets smashed. Broken pieces of porcelain are scattered over the dark green carpet that covers the room floor. Later I won’t even bother to pick them up. A dark corner of the room attracts me as a bee impulsively driven to a flower. I sit there, tears and more tears. But I can’t cry anymore. The fountain and reservoir have dried. Is it possible to cry dry tears? Because it’s what I’ve been crying for so long.
    Minutes and hours tick away and the floor feels harder than ever. I look around the mess my room is but nothing like that matters anymore. Like a junkie is to the brownish powder, like a bee is to the flower, so am I to the window. Not what it is, but what it promises.
    The sun has passed and shines its light on the other side of the house, still bright but not blinding bright anymore. The street is silent after the neighborhood rush-hour. A lone man walks his dog and pretends not to notice when the animal decides to release its overstuffed bowels in the middle of the sidewalk. Two women chat and giggle, arm in arm. One of them laughs louder when the other points at the dog or the man. An ice-cram van, jingling, parks for a few minutes at the end of the street, enough time for half a dozen kids to go home happy. A couple gets out of a car and walks against the wind that started to blow, slowly and with matching steps. Mid-thirties maybe. She befalls into the bottle-blond category, but with discreet enough clothes not to deserve a second look. He, on the other hand, imposes a full presence and might even be a bromide person but, if nothing else, the smile of confidence is enough to make me want to traverse the distance and become him. Could he be a company manager, a lawyer or even a politician? The cement-colored suit can make him be any of those and more. But I’m not interested in those details. All I want is to be him in this instant, the present, the now. The urgency makes me quivery. I can almost feel the suit covering my skin. Not almost; my window makes me feel it, the soft tissue in my arm embraced by the hands of the blond. I think I’ll be a politician, ruling the fates of the world by day and be a family man by night. Boring. I think I’ll be a politician with a twist: the blond is my lash at fun. The room where I’m going is a witty place, a stop before going back to be the family man the world sees but I never was. I am a master of deception trained only for the moments of lust and carnal liberation the far-from-pristine body in front of me promises. In her house, in her room, in her bed I’m not a family man and never wanted to be one. I’m an object no different from herself. And in the ways of an object, mechanically, we release ourselves in a mingle of passionate sweat, screams and heat. I can feel the touch, the kiss, the embrace. My skin is on fire; every nerve an explosion of messages that talk about pleasure and warmth. After all, I came here for nothing else. Dominance is the word. I have her in the ways I want, not for once thinking that she might be the one wanting my ways. Later I lie down in the sweat plastered sheets not daring to look at her. Disgust sweeps me and my dignity away, but I know I’ll come back for more, like the bee and the junkie always do. In the end, I know I always will.
    Back in my room my tears are not rooted by disgust. In this room I’ve lived so many lives that disgust is a too simple feeling for me to weep for. They roll down my face because I don’t know how to express myself in any other way. And in the deepest core of definitions any emotion can be demonstrated by tears. Disgust is not what I feel but what he felt. I only educe the pleasure, the touch, the dominance. That’s why I took over his life, nothing more. When you live of emotions and to emotions all your life, you can afford to be picky and extract only those you want.
    But lives grow short in this window and end in the blink of an eye. A whole life can be translated into minutes, into seconds, and be squeezed of the emotions that I’m after and discarded afterward. Remember the last orange juice you made? My window is the juicer and my life the glass that collects and keeps collecting, never quite brimming.
    The sun begins to set on the horizon I can’t see. The day is almost at an end. Outside, the wind has departed to other streets, to dry some other tears. An old man, probably enjoying the last moments of light, slowly moves on the sidewalk. He, like me, also has an inseparable friend albeit a more visible one than mine: the walking stick that advances a step for each step he advances. A wool cap covers his head and ears, offering some protection from the cold air. A pale half-moon marks the imminent victory of night over day. Besides the cap, he dons typical old men’s clothes. Typical old men’s wrinkles cover his face in a fashion some would call signs of wiseness, probably being old people themselves. How many thoughts, how many memories inhabit inside the aging brain? And those memories I grab without a second thought and sketch them as mine. But the old man’s memory is faulty and so my memories are faulty: images flowing to be interrupted by gaps of emptiness that one must jump to reach the next piece of his life. He was a baby once but all I see from those times are his mother’s eyes, now my mother’s eyes, sweet eyes, shinning with exhilarating joy and smiling on their own despite the tiredness of motherhood; my first scratch on the knee from a tumble on a dirt pathway; a world of toys with their shiny buttons and squeaky sounds littering the bed and the room, and I, amongst them, creating new lives for the teddy bear or the newest action figure my father bought for my last birthday; the school, an enormous frightening place with tall monsters with glasses that screamed at you when the lesson was not studied, but that, in the end, even I managed to tame; the other school, where the beautiful brunette used to sit in front of me, and turn so slightly just to tease me with her eyes; the same school some years later, my nose broken by a group of thugs that insisted I could not be with the brunette anymore; me in an ugly rainy clouds-colored suit with a green tie that just didn’t match on my first day at the new job, feeling proud and unscarred by everything that belonged to the past; other suit and other place, the suit black, the place singing with euphoria as I heard and said the magic words that united me to the person that once used to tease me in a classroom; same colored suit with matching colored tie, as I buried her twenty two years later; the wrinkles on my face turning up in a smile as I said good-bye for the last time to everyone around the office on my retirement day; the sun setting over the city as I get out of the house, protected with my wool cap against the twilight chill and leaning on my walking stick, my companion for the last eight years, to walk around the block as the doctor prescribed; an empty window in a brick house, with a faint light coming from it and trespassing the night, victorious in the dark street, only inhibited by some letters someone wrote on the inside of the glass in a rusty ink: “To all the lives I had but could never live”. How nice.
    As the blood flows freely from my wrists into the floor, staining the carpet on the corner I now sit, what flashes before my eyes is not my own life but the made-up lives I gave to others. No tears dilute the pool of blood for I’m not crying. The effort of pumping the remaining blood is too much for my heart and it begins to quit. The beatings, after the initial rush, eventually stop. In the last moment alive I look into that window and, with a smile now tattooed on my lips, read the final words that will never be heard by anyone, but are still shared in blood, by my window, to the world.



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