At the Window

by Helena Krobath

The window here is a little grubby, and outside stands a thin row of trees, right now thin and breathless and motionless as carbon sketches. The wind, that rogue, slips in like a serpent and excites my skin. The cars hum. The neighbour smokes. I sit. I imagine.

I am not old, but I can see the way time works, a trickster making us believe in lines. It fools me into thinking my skin is a little looser under the eyes today instead of fixed like a carbon sketch. I go through bodies like kleenex. I’m on my fifth one.

I had a thought . . . I can’t remember. It's in the eyes of everyone I see, wistful, bemused, uncertain. The forgotten thought.

Then it comes to me. You are in a deep black ocean. You're surfacing and diving and surfacing. When you surface, you remember. You see the breadth of the ocean and all across it the faces of other people surfacing.

Some of them are people you know very well, your souls, who, when you were under last, seemed distorted and foreign like your own face in a mirror when you've lost your mind.

And surfacing, you have a good laugh about how, back underneath, where memory doesn’t exist, you were enemies, with uneasy feelings of not knowing something that should be known.

And so you killed their children. Blind deaf impotent like a lion in a cage or a shark on the sand, you lashed out. It was all wrong and unfair. Everywhere the same guarded looks, the same hooded eyes. Night music and cries of rage.

Until you break the surface and the cold thick ink of the void surrounds you and you feel safer floating in that endless sea than you ever felt on earth traveling the paths of men. All around you, faces are coming up and eyes opening.

Oh, it’s you, you say. I thought you were just a stranger at the airport! That was you! I thought you were just a face in a window.

And then you hold them all, wet with the dark water, and laugh, laugh, laugh. Should we go under again? See if we can get ourselves born somewhere really grand? And this time we won't forget each other. We'll know ourselves and the mystery we come from.

What the hell, they say, and you dive under, find yourselves born on opposite ends of an alien planet, them with grey skin and you with blue, both miserable in your adventure because you think it’s real, the end, the fullness of time, your identity. Who am I? you ask yourself. Why am I here?