Story

The story doesn't end. What really happened was that a woman looked out the window of her office and saw 2 big apartment blocks. She had looked at them daily for years, several times a day. But that day she needed a story. To get her out. A dead body to clear away the guilt. To wash away - no - to prove that certain parts of her life were a fiction.
A fiction that disappeared in the powdered cracks on the faces of old women she watched at noon in the sandwich bar drinking coffee and talking. Widows. Always at the same table, in the shadow of the ugly concrete apartment blocks.
A fiction of things to come or things never to happen.
She watched the old lady with the black dog and dignified hairdo drag herself along the pavement with a walker. Slowly moving, struggling with clenched teeth. Nobody looked, nobody ever cared whether she would finally make it to the sandwich bar or not.
So every afternoon the woman who wrote the story nodded at the old women in the sandwich bar. She smiled at the black dog and the dignified hairdo and thought of death. She tried to imagine what the 5 last years of her life will be like.

But what about the story of Sarah and Claire? Did Sarah get killed in the line of duty, by a stray bullet, before she ever could tell Claire she loved her? Or did they get together again eventually?
What does it mean when someone tells you they want to spend their life with you? When someone whispers: "I want to stay with you forever"? Sarah always found it an idea too difficult to grasp. She used to run away from it without looking into her heart.

Back at her desk in the office the woman who wrote the story asked herself: "What do I prefer? Fiction or memory?"

Commentaires