The Walls

Running in the iridescent, warming October sun, a woman held a book, rearing an appalling feature. I almost stopped in my tracks. I couldn’t believe what I saw. It made me think about painting.

After my double-take, reassuring what I saw was suitable for my lacking confidence, I ran back to the house. I was tempted to call everyone I knew or maybe even put up a witty status update on Facebook. But I didn’t. Instead I sat on the porch of my beach front house.

I watched her close and I watched her safely. I watched her for the last hour of light and I watched her pack up from the turn of dark. I watched her walked down the beach access to her house.

From my vantage, she looked like no one I’d ever seen before, but I still wasn’t convinced. I stood up from my porch and squinted because I knew she was nearing. My house has a bright blue tin roof with a matching colored door, very visible, yet appealing to the many onlookers who saw my “For Sale,” sign. I had to be careful. I didn’t want her to see me.

After many attempts of placing a name with her unfamiliar face, I was left more pleased that I didn’t know her. She was not a family member, or a close friend, or a close friend of a friend, or even a friend of a friend from work.

She walked to the fourth house from mine and climbed the stairs entering the house. All details led to her being a tourist. Someone from somewhere else. Someone I didn’t know. Someone who didn’t know me.

All at once, I feared she knew all of my secrets about things I never told anyone about. Would fear be the accurate assessment of my physically arousing state? Antsy, yet burdened with regret, or is it the wonderment of what she actually knows about me versus the words that collect my person?

I had to follow her. I walked down the road, recently littered with tourist traffic of summer, now completely deserted with only a few vacationers left, and I headed straight for her house.

The walk to the door was steep with stilt barring wood and galvanized nails, perfectly aligned with four nail-beds per board. I looked through her window and saw steam flowing from the bathroom directly in the view of her front door. Shower.

Any normal rental house in the off-season months would have been locked for the safety of the lingering, local teenagers looking for a joy house to party in. This house was unlocked because, in fact, she was a vacationer who might have the summer season mixed up with fall, but more or less left her front door unlocked.

Then, I saw it. A book faced down on the kitchen table to left. I opened the door. I knew I didn’t know her and if she came out of the bathroom right then she’d probably jump out of her towel, and I’m not opposed to that possibility, but I remained unseen, unknown.

I picked the book up and she had doggy-eared her current page.

“Have some respect!” I yelled in my head.

I didn’t have to, but I turned over the book, just to be positive. Looking at the cover, starting at the bottom, I scan for any distinction of it being a different book. At first glance, the water rippled with glass-like reflections and a needle pointing straight down. A little further up the cover, the needle turned into the beak of a pelican, mildly aged, pointing his beak downward into the water.

The title reads, “Inks No Impact.” A book of secrets kept in hidden boxes of the brain where no one can reach, like how the pelican will never dive farther than five feet in the deep ocean. It’s a book about how memories are like tattoos without ink, always fades, but never leaves.

The pipes echoed a vibration to my eardrum, indicating my need for an immediate exit. I did. I even put the book faced down and although I had just left, she will be carrying my face around until she finishes my seventy-second chapter.

As if seeing someone reading my book on the beach, with a face recognizable to no one I knew, captured the complexity of a gun, then I’d paint the walls with my brain and die happy.

Only as a metaphor, I live with a message of contentment, in my own dark way.