A Window Into the Soul
I live in the crack of a dilapidated building.
This crack is no ordinary crack. This crack is as stale and moldy as last week’s bread and just as cheap, which is the only reason I live in the crack of a dilapidated building.
My room is furnished with the bare necessities: a bed, toilet, shower above the toilet, and a mini-fridge. It also has a fan, which doesn't quite make up for the lack of A/C, but I’m superstitious and fear that as soon as I complain about that creaking bastard, it will self-implode.
The stairs I live beneath are made of wood that was solid 100 years ago. They creak and groan every time the tenant above me comes and goes. While I’ve never seen this tenant, by the way my slanted ceiling flexes under their boot, I can safely infer that he or she weighs double, if not triple, what I do.
This would not bother me in the slightest if my head did not rest directly under the stairs that were solid 100 years ago.
My room has two windows. One is small and the other is smaller. Both are portals into foreign and interesting worlds.
Window 1:
(Jarvis, enhance image)
From my crack beneath the stairs, I look out onto the free world and see this abomination glaring back.
An incredible abomination.
A nightmare.
A nightmare straight out of Dr. Seuss’s darkest hours.
Despite what you may believe, this building is wildly alive with residents. Children dart and disappear along that uneven balcony all through the day.
While I am not bullish on the structural integrity of this building, I have grown to adore it. It is much preferable to the oppressive, limiting, and horrendously unimaginative postmodern architecture that has consumed the West.
I can look at a Rothko and know it’s a Rothko.
I can read a paragraph of Hemingway and know it’s Hemingway.
I can listen to a phrase from Miles Davis and know it’s Miles Davis.
I can look at this building and know it belongs in Tbilisi, Georgia.
From the crack under the stairs, I look out and see a beaming example of unabashed authenticity. This is why I have grown to love the Dr. Seuss building. It is a screaming reminder of my aim in both creation and life.
My second window is even more interesting.
Grape vines, laundry lines, and a family that loves to dine and whine.
That’s not a typo. I do mean whine.
Across the courtyard lives a family of six women: two old, one ancient, one middle-aged, and two young ones. I have never seen a man with them. In fact, in the last month, I have not seen a man enter this courtyard. If my heavy-footed friend upstairs turns out not to be a man, then it would seem that I am the only poor lout in the entire dilapidated building.
This was quite a startling realization.
Not because women scare me, but because I thought I unknowingly moved into a den of witches! That would certainly explain the litter of black cats roaming around. Perhaps even, my landlord was in magical debt of sorts and needed to find an ignorant traveler to offer as tribute.
(Living underground with too much time to think will tempt the mind to explore every possible explanation, no matter how wildly egregious.)
The ancient woman never scares me. She seems more or less completely oblivious to my existence. The other two oracles are a different can of worms.
Firstly, they are more or less identical twins. They talk the same, hobble the same, and wear the same clothes: jet black dresses with even blacker shawls.
I say more or less identical because they each have a unique feature.
One has a mole jutting out from the right side of her chin that even a blind man could see. This is not because it’s large, though it certainly is no speck of an island, but because of the grey hairs that shoot out from it like water out of Bellagio Fountains.
I don’t know if this is a clear enough picture, so allow me to continue.
These hairs are so prominent that when I first shook her hand, my eyes fell from hers and caught sight of one the heads of the Hydra lunging directly towards the top of my thumb! Though I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, I often can’t help it. I thought if that hair came in contact with my hand, it would mean certain amputation. Perhaps from the elbow down. Or worse, I would wake in the morning with my own Bellagio Fountain mole!
By sheer luck and good fortune, she released her iron grip just in the nick of time for me to retract my hand into the safety of my coat jacket. The hair continued in a beeline, plunging itself directly into a warm and familiar place: the center of her coffee mug.
The twin sister’s distinct feature is her lazy left eye. Remember, her sister’s mole is on the right side of the chin. This means two things:
When they are talking amongst themselves, face-to-face and in their usual stools, I have no basis whatsoever to tell them apart.
When they are talking directly to me, my skins crawls but my feet freeze.