Blank. Cold. Empty room spared from the constant click of gnawed pens, the rattle of metal clasps on plastic tables. Open. An open room, where the window does us the decency of actually showing the world, not this blurry nightmare of blubbery, sandpaper-paned glass, every shade of insipidity. Stupidity thrives, incognito. How can I be sure this wave of sprinkler water is water, not chloroform?
If I could just step outside for sixty seconds. If I could step shoeless in a forest—any forest—for one minute. That’s all. Plop me in, crammed beside these metal bars crammed in my chest, crammed here between work and worms. I’d be OK. That’s all.
Dew on orange moss. Bluebirds singing where you’ll never see them. Wind dancing through an aspen grove. Crisp, omnipresent crunch of leaves beneath my feet. Breathe. Cry. This is the undiscovered country we all choose not to remember. This is the secret life within me, the azure autumn sunsets now just a memory—then, there, a decade ago, the daily journey I used to make back to my twin-sized bed.
Perhaps memories are all we are. Golems of accumulated left-overs for supper, the landfills of shopping bags beneath our kitchen sinks. That’s a bit cynical. Let’s try again.
Perhaps we are awake only because we can dream. Perhaps we make new choices now only because our memories construct a hidden world, all on our own, all in our own copses of beech trees. Perhaps the window I yearn for so badly now only exists within myself, neurological crackling combos in my prefrontal cortex. My brain—every brain—is in literal, perpetual darkness, locked in a pitch-black skull. The eyes are no windows. The eyes act as free agents, as far as I’m concerned. But the brain tells the secret: blackbirds always know when to nest.