Something Real

It was a wine glass. It was beautiful, it was expensive, it was… French. It was the illusion of culture seeping into my choice of wine glasses. Proof that I'm American. Proof that I'm twice removed from anything real. As I stared into the translucent glass, I saw the same soft cream wall I've always stared at. And through the glass, the wall looked brittle and fragile… what's worse was that it looked bored… it looked dead. While staring at the white-yellow of the lights above bouncing off of the glass I realized I was no longer looking into the glass. I was looking at myself. Air softly forced itself into my throat, almost making me gasp. I can blame air, the weather, the world for what happened next, but it was my fault. The wine glass slipped through my fingers. I dropped the beautiful, expensive, French wine glass with my fingers. Immediately I felt removed from it, the second it crashed onto the marble floor and the staccato of the crack pierced the silence; it was as if I were too good to be seen with anything broken --no matter how beautiful. To do so would have been a tad redundant. The moment it touched the marble floor I realized how much harder it is to appreciate something when it can't be fixed.

I live a life far removed from anything real. The people, the places, they're all copies, of copies, of something we wouldn't recognize. I'm trapped between rows of perfect bleached white teeth always carved into smiles that hardly feel human. I'm not sure, if anyone in this generation even knows what human is anymore. I’m surrounded by polite, stiff and lifeless robots. I wrote obituaries, short, impersonal notes about a person I never knew. I praised these people, in their death, as if they were saints. I wrote about how loved they were, ignoring the autopsy’s proclamation that they overdosed. I wrote about their lives, as if they were fulfilled, as if they were happy, as if they were different from the monotonous sea of mechanical faces I see everyday. As if in death, these people finally became real.

These obituaries allowed me to realize that awful things happen. Like the mother who drowned her children as she bathed them. Or the widowed father who was shot at point blank range on his way home to see his kids. Or the little boy who was playing jacks when a car bomb went off. Or the young woman who died of a heroin overdose in her apartment and sat lonely and dead for two days before she was found. These awful things will continue to happen. But the names will change, and the adjectives may be a tad different. That's the way the world works, I’ve been told.

My sister and I do lunch in her apartment on Wednesdays. We promised our parents we'd play nice and keep in touch. We accomplish that by staring at each other across the decrepit table that sits in the middle of her kitchen, living room, and bedroom. She’ll gaze at me with her frozen and bored eyes and a cocked eyebrow as she took long drags of her cigarette. Her face was stuck asking “-and who are you?” and often I couldn’t answer. The small apartment that she seemed so happy to move into all of those years ago, with small gold wind chimes that sang beautifully, watched our dreadfully dull interactions. It was always a temporary home, so much so that she never unpacked all of her things. Her temporary home was quickly filled with the skeletons that couldn’t fit in her closet, her suitcases and our unsaid words, all dusted over age. This Wednesday was the same as any other Wednesday but her apartment smelled a tad different.

As I opened the door I saw the soft aged pink sitting unassuming on the walls. A far cry from the passionate red it once resembled. She is in the corner. Two small knees pulled loosely against her underdeveloped chest. The winds soft fingers caress her through the holes her stockings and brush up against her legs. The room is one big blur. One large soft whisper. These hazy days have eaten at her skin. Her lips, once known for their childish grins, are cracked. Her mouth, filled with fickle words, is now dry and hangs limp. The gold chimes sing in muted tones outside. From here everything seems numb. Those bored blue eyes have forced themselves shut. I walk over and watch her limb body, half-expecting it to do something. It doesn't. I stare at us in the mirror that watches from the opposite wall, unable to determine which image I am. And even with the stale scent of death in the air, the repetition here tastes sweet.