She walks hastily, brushing past people like a lightning bolt. She doesn’t care about the rest of the world. All she wants is to get out of this mess. The crowd makes her sick. She can’t take their smell. Their eyes quickly wander on her face, staring for a few seconds before disappearing into the anonimity of the subway car, and she forces herself to reject their blank looks. She ignores them, thinking they’re dead bodies standing for the sake of filling up an otherwise empty vessel. She abhorres the noise around her. Her thoughts immediately drift once she finds a comfortable spot with enough space not to feel claustrophobic.
She pictures herself very far from this hell, living in a farm, with two kids and a nice man to be her husband, maybe a dog or two, many cats, and horses. She gets rid of the make up and the blow dry, the suit and the expensive Cartier watch, the Chloe bag and the Tory Burch shoes, the Kate Spade earrings and the Louis Vuitton necklace. She virtually cleanses all the superficiality off her skin, and aims at remaining the simple country girl she grew up as. She remembers her feet in the mud, her head full of ideas, her dishevelled hair playing with the wind, and her bitten fingernails virgin to manicures. She runs with rubber boots through the fields in dirty sweat pants, her shirt torn at the sleeve, and her eyes lost on the horizon while she sings a melody of her own composition.
“Let me be free, from this world of oppression, let me find my voice in the silence of my reason, I want to dream, I want to fly, I want to love and never die…”
She makes it up on the spot, letting words flow out of her mouth like blossoming flowers. Nothing stops her. She feels invincible at the top of her hill, overlooking her kingdom of cows, corn, trees and daisies.
With a ballpoint blue pen, its cap bearing her teeth marks, she writes poetry on a notepad covered in redacted portions that create a maze of criss-crossed lines, words entangled to form an illegible mass of obliterated thoughts. She suddenly draws a smile at the bottom of one page. She loves it here. Her cat by her side, she’s a queen among the nothingness.
It all had to go. She grew up to be serious. A lawyer, to say the least, is dead serious. She’d have been a doctor had it not occurred that she couldn’t stand the sight of blood.
Life took a different turn once she left the countryside. She went to law school. She stopped reading novels to replace them with law books. She became a law book worm. She drank the filthy words, and they infected her like a disease. There was no room for her imagination to flourish anymore. That part of her had officially died.
She grins. The guy across from her gives a weird look. Yeah, she didn’t lose her mind. Yet. She will eventually, if she stays here.
The train slows down to a stop. Grand Central Terminal 42nd street, hub for all possible traffic mixing tourists, homeless people, preachers, models, business men, nurses, teachers, school kids, babies, strollers, nanies, elderly, teenagers in love, and perverts, to name a few…
She exits, and rushes for the turnstiles. At the bottom of the stairs, she feels somebody passing next to her, almost forcing her to step down. She looks to her side, and sees this guy. He must be seventy. He looks really old.
He hands her something.
“Miss… It fell from your pocket.”
She stares at him. She has no pockets. She wants to ignore him, but she hates to be rude. She usually manages so well not to talk to people on her way to work. Why must today be the exception?
“Thank you.” she quickly utters and grabs the piece of paper. She has to leave. No time to waste.
She goes up the stairs, runs through the doors, reaches the street, hails a cab, opens the cab door, lands on the backseat. The paper stays in her hand.
She distractingly opens the folded piece. Something’s scribbled on it.
A phone number. And these exact words.
“Gene – Evening’s best.”
She glances outside and rips it in a million confetti.
Back to her drifting mood, she thinks of the fields again. The dirt, the mud and the air, free from exhaust pipe gas and eight million people’s stench. She imagines the sky and animal shapes on clouds. Any direction she looks at, she sees grass.
She needs to get out. Anywhere far from this urban jungle. Fast.
