Free Baltimore by Jelena Lengold

from him, a moment of silence and stillness, and then I’m already getting up and gathering my clothes off the floor.
    As I’m putting on my shoes and leaving, he slowly gets up, lights up a cigarette, and goes to the window. Maybe he’s watching me leave, or not. I’ve never stood at any of his windows and I don’t know where they’re facing. And that’s why I don’t know if he can see me as I get into the cab and continue my ride. I always have a feeling he can, but it’s also very likely I’m wrong. In fact, he might be looking in a completely different direction, forgetting about me as soon as I close the door. Which is okay in a way.
    The cab driver is waiting for me downstairs. He’s reading the newspaper, smoking a cigarette, not suspecting a thing. He says: All done, madam, finished? I say: Finished. He asks: Where to now? And I give him my address.
    We drive on. That good feeling between my legs lasts a long time after.
    It would be nice to have a lover like that. And then to come home and lie back in your tub, your sofa chair, your bed. Wash up, change into something comfortable, heat up some soup. And talk about the insignificant things that happened that day. I think this would make the usual everyday house chores even more pleasant. I can distance myself enough to see this scene played out. My husband and I are sitting at the table and blowing into our spoons of hot soup, I’m smiling at him the way every woman should smile at her husband during dinner, making the usual chit-chat like please-hand-me-the-salt and would-you-like-some-more-soup and what’s-on-TV-tonight and I-could-really-use-a-nap-now-what-about-you and here’s-half-the-newspaper, and everyone is happy.

Later, I felt like she already knew so much about me that it was becoming unbearable. I wanted to never see her again. I wanted to crawl into a hole and hide somewhere far from everyone. Most of all, I wanted to hide from her.
    It started out harmlessly enough: By relaxing my body, from the tip of my head, down my neck, then through my lungs… the light that was supposed to pass through me and nurture me. That’s what she said. “Observe the thing that is your life… find the vulnerable, painful places and nurture yourself….”
    All I could see was endless space, very similar to the photographs of the universe. Everything I wanted to touch seemed too far to reach. Standing between me and everything else was an immense, never-ending darkness. For some reason, this was what my life looked like at that moment, and it slid from the top of my head towards my feet in this exact form. Millions of tons of darkness, remoteness, implosions, and black holes descended through me. And when she said my feet should sprout roots, it was quite unnecessary. The black holes had already riveted me to the ground with a force more powerful than anything she could possibly say. And so I sat there, with roots coming out of my shoes, eyes closed, and hands crossed in my lap.
    “Go back to your earliest childhood,” she said. “Imagine you’re watching an unedited movie. Various images appear. They’re not in chronological order. Some images are nice and others not so much. There are both happy and sad images. Some linger, while others just fly by. Try to see yourself in all these images….”
    One image appeared immediately, but it wasn’t important. Many other images followed. Shadows on curtains, at night. My grandfather reading me a bed-time story. Grass. Worms under a rock, and their bodies wriggling on a little branch. Screams of other children as I fling a worm at them. A well in the middle of an orchard. My grandmother yelling at me not to go near the well. Me, going there anyway, as soon as no one is looking. A look down. The coldness it emanates. The taste of the water in the bucket. Water that makes your teeth go numb. The smell of the fence. Grandfather’s tools for painting the fence. Cans. Brushes. Paint thinner. Garage. Old court