Window In the Wall

If walls could talk, would you talk back? You wouldn’t be the first one, trust me. It’s normal here. But we don’t like to use that word. Not anymore, anyway. It used to be thrown around all the time, though. And if you weren’t normal, you got thrown here. Sometimes literally.

It started innocently enough. “It’s for your own good,” they would say. But it never really felt like that for most of my friends. They talked to me often, they would tell me. Or talked to my cousins, I guess you would say. Walls in different rooms in different buildings, sometimes in different countries. I imagine some will talk to my distant cousins on distant planets some day.

Walls stick together, even when we are apart. We provide a foundation. A sense of comfort. But we are sometimes just as equally discomforting. Sometimes we close in instead, with claustrophobia instead of contentment. But we are always there to listen.

“I’m afraid”, she says.

I wait in silence.

“What are you afraid of”? A woman in a tweed pantsuit and horn-rimmed glasses raises her eyebrows in question.

“Everything”, she answers.

Her name is Maria. She wears a black hoodie, loose-fitting blue-jeans, and a sour expression on her face, as if she swapped her throat lozenge for a lemon.

She’s been here every week, Monday and Friday, like clockwork, for seven years. But this week is different.

She looks into my eyes and begins counting my cracks and peels of paint in the corners. Ms. Horn-Rimmed thought it would be cute to cover me with wallpaper after she decided the layers of “Eggshell” and “Robin’s Egg” were too clinical.

She concentrates hard on a fraying piece of paper and resists the urge to peel it back from the wall. It’s a painting of a flower. Who can blame her for wanting to play a bit of “He loves me, he loves me not?”

He, after all, was partly why she was in here.

He used to yell at me. Of course, this isn’t saying much. He used to yell at everything. But I would often get the brunt. Of words, and fists. I made sure he was never left unscathed, though. One time, he hit a stud, and I sent him to the Emergency Room. He missed the next session.

That was seven years ago. I can tell by counting the rings under Maria’s eyes. She hasn’t been sleeping well.

“This is a milestone, Maria.” “Awareness is the first step,” the woman in tweed declares.

Maria shifts in her seat, uncrossing her legs.

“You’ve recognized your fear. Now you have to understand why it’s here.”

I can see her eyes glaze over, and it looks like she is gazing straight through me into another time. I remember when.

The moment when his knuckles met my nails, after his hands clutched her throat. I will never forget the look on his face.

She snaps back to the present, as if returning from a trance.

“Why am I afraid?!” Maria scoffed. She thought it was perfectly obvious.

“Because every time I love someone, they hurt me.” “Every time I open myself up, I find another reason to close up shop again. Another reason to put up my walls.”

I can’t argue with her logic, but her sense of despair saddens me.

“When it comes to construction, walls aren’t always useful,” says Ms. Horn-Rimmed. ”Sometimes we build them so tall or so thick that we can’t let anyone through.” “But boundaries?” “Those are always good.”

Maria pauses to chew on the thought.

“I like my walls,” she quips. “But I think I’ll put in a window”.