So sleet and snow have returned. Odd. But really not unexpected.
I am still eating salad for dinner. My weight is not decreasing but I look at myself sometimes in the big mirrors at work and feel a little sad at how gaunt my wrists are. Or thought, at least, how unmanly. But why care about unmanly?
There's this man who almost always gets off the train with me at the small station near my house. He is often carrying his little PC laptop, still open, as if he could still do one more second of work on it while he walks up the stairs and through the passage way before exposing his laptop to the unfriendly open-air. He did the same today. He is so odd. When he is not holding his laptop open, he is running in a hurry. I have never seen what he is in a hurry for. No bus. No one waiting for him. He is a middle-age man with a salt-and-pepper ponytail. His eyes gaunt, sunken. He seems even thinner than me, if you can believe it. He smiles at me when he actually makes the time to make eye contact with me, during that split second before running up the stairs or returning to his computer being carried. I wonder about him. What does he do? Why does he run? Whom does he live with? Or alone? Does he have friends?
People who are always running around find it more difficult to notice things, such as other people running around.
Today my buddy told me again she loved me. I realized what she says means something new, too. It helps me stop feeling guilty. When an unhealthy relationship ends in my life, it often ends in a nasty way, prolonged, dragged out in a torturous manner hurtful to both people. I always feel guilty playing a role making the other person feel miserable. I feel guilty that I am petty, demanding, needy, manipulative, etc, etc. And to hear a friend tell me how lucky she is to have me in her life repositions my guilt a little better. Maybe I am not such a cynical, manipulative, pessimist if someone I respect greatly repeatedly tells me I am a great person.
So enough about me. For the rest of Lent I will do my best to stop talking about me. It's a blog about my new life, but not necessarily about the old hurts, the old wounds manifesting themselves in new situations.
He is a little startled by the sound of broken glass under his feet. He hates broken glass. He remembers the many cuts he had when he was a child because no one told him to be careful. Or when his dad told him, it was always in a mean way that made him feel guilty about not already knowing the dangers of life since birth. The sound of broken glass always startles him. He is careful not to do anything to make the broken glass on the broken windows fall down, maybe cutting him, but just the sound of broken glass would make him uncomfortable.
This used to be a bakery. Now abandoned. There are many windows, all with half-broken glass now. There is no light, though the fixture above him remains familiar. He steps away from the windows and sinks a bit into the darkness, away from the reaches of the sunlight.
A gust of wind blows through the broken windows. He remembers sitting here ten years ago. Where was that couch? It's not here anymore. Now everything is in a mess, and the darkness with its accomplice the blanket of dust, makes it difficult to orient oneself. He used to come here a lot. But the one evening he remembers was when he came, as always, after the bakery was closed and he sat in the couch that was somewhere in front of him now, and there he watched the second of the old Star Wars movies with the baker's daughter.
It was a winter evening because the sun had already gone to its rest even though it was not so late. The baker, an old Polish Jew whose only sign of Jewishness was his nose, always welcomed him and left him and his daughter some unsold baked goodies while he went off somewhere he never asked about, that his daughter didn't know either. He can't remember her name. Just that her last name was impossible to pronounce. It's only been ten years since that evening, since he had last seen her.
He walks over to the a pile of broken furniture, after his eyes got adjusted to the dimness of the the area near the door to the bathroom. It must have been not too long since he had last seen her that the bakery closed down, abandoned, and that no one else came to make it something else. He gathers this from identifying a lamp that used to be next to them when they were watching their movies, that second Star Wars movie being their last one. It was a lamp from some garage sale, its signature is the big chip on the base that hasn't grown since being tossed to this corner many years ago.
He doesn't know what happened to them. He never cared until now. Maybe he should have cared. Maybe things mattered even if they take a pause for a short while. Unless that isn't a short while. Sometimes he would look her up on the Internet, but he couldn't remember her name. He had so successfully erased it. He did it by giving her a different name that night after he left. He called her Persia. He thought he was clever. Playing with the word "persa", "Lost" in Italian. Was she lost or did he lose her, or something. In his bitterness he wanted something funny to remember her by. That night of Star Wars Episode V, was a week into Lent. Every morning, very early, for the rest of those forty days, he walked by the bakery, before she would be awake though the smell of Eastern European baking would be evident from miles away, he would walk past by, mutter her new name, and picture the interior of the baking room with the couch and TV without looking through the big windows. He wasn't Catholic; like her and her father, he wasn't religious. But the austerity of abstinence during Lent inspired him to rebel against all his feelings for her, rebel against her treachery, against all the disappointments. It helped too that she never called him. Now he thinks perhaps it was because she understood. They were young, she was even younger, but she seemed, from the present retrospect, more mature than most women he had met since then. She gave him the distance. Or perhaps she simply was too preoccupied to care anymore. The pain, somehow, is still felt, to him, as if all the glass cuts from more than twenty years ago still feel fresh.
He turns around and sees the pouring of sunlight into the dusty baking room. The machines have been removed or stolen. The emptiness, or the chaos in it, makes this portrait of a past seem mournful. He takes out his smartphone, places it between his eyes and the past before him, whose dust helps the sun's illumination, and he clicks on the camera button. Her name is still lost. Her face is a blur. The glass cuts are actually not so acute, probably just made up in his mind, artifice like the dust here that comes from the unknown exterior. And his regrets, betrayed by the sunlight, but still, the dust will settle one day, and probably soon the whole building won't be left abandoned much longer before the bulldozers come. He steps toward the hole through which he had come in, stepping on broken glass every step or two, not heeding to the memories of glass cuts.
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