When I was a student, there was a ravishing woman with peculiar thin Medusa hair whom I drove past every late morning. I stopped a couple of narrow town houses down from hers to throw my garbage out, where the garbage metal containers were all huddled near each other on a clearing made before a thicket of larch trees on the side of the downhill road. We waved to one another.
She always waved first and always with the hand holding her cigarette, since the other one was sheltered in the pocket of either her oversized army-green trench coat, or thin summer/fall blue cotton cardigan (depending on which season we were in).
And from the ball that was in her pocket, I could tell that she always had that insulated hand fisted around the handle of her dog’s leash. Somehow the bulge of her knuckle that stretched the fabric of her pocket outwards told me that this woman was physically strong and emotionally resilient. Her dog was a small teddy-bear-brown terrier; he also stopped his sniffing each morning to tilt his head as if in greeting to me.
I had no idea that I looked for this woman every day for God knows how long, until she wasn’t there one morning. After then, when she returned, I was always aware that when I went downhill to throw the garbage out I was going to be looking for her neighbourly greeting that lingered seconds longer that normal neighbourly greetings should last.
I was on my second year of graduate school, studying International Communications but spending most of my productive time where life emotionally threw me, delved into books about the pineal gland to desperately learn about methods for my mind to govern my body. My friends were all reading about similar stuff; it was the beginning of today’s raving mind journey trend.
She could have been a tired but good-looking 38-year-old, or a healthy looking 50-year-old pumped with hyaluronic acid and Botox. Either way, it’s all about biological age these days. That’s the New Age.
So it comes to no surprise that I was the least curious, as should you be, about the woman’s numerical age. It was her “aura”, so to say, that I noticed and which I felt too unscholarly and foolish to acknowledge as any “sign” as to why, amongst all the strangers that reappeared in my life daily, this one was magnificent. I kept reaffirming to myself that she was nothing suggestive of any indication beyond my storytelling mind.
Her hair was short enough to stick out from all sides, with time I noted that it was the type of hair which the more one combs, the more it yields a “wispy” result. I mention her hair so much to then highlight its irrelevance against her starkly contrasting beautiful face. It had such an eloquent gaze – A Light! – Even in its’ careless self-destructive sideways flinch while inhaling the breath of her Gauloises Red cigarette like it were fresh air.
Her protruding cheekbones blotched with impassioned pink venous blotches when it got cold; her blood was quick and eager to warm her body. She chain-smoked as she marched on either summer grass or black snow on the sidewalk in front of her home, always looking at her feet in deep thought until she heard the rustle of my garbage bags.
She then watched me across the street (I could see her from the corner of one eye, always the same eye), as I dumped my daily garbage, until she heard the lid of the metal container slam shut against itself or against the stuffed plastic of other accumulated garbage bags. That sound was my cue to look her way, and her cue to wave.
Every single day, she raised one hand with a cigarette pinched between two fingers. Sometimes the thin smoke from her cigarette rose in the foreground against the chimney smoke of the old man’s top floor apartment in my building behind her, higher up on the hill, and that was how I also knew whether the man in that flat was having a productive day cooking or an intrinsic day thinking, after word had been going around that his wife had passed away the year before. I was always reassured when he was cooking. Even though I rarely said hello to the man.
Anyway, she wouldn’t lower her hand until I waved back, nodded, and walked up the hill. I sometimes caught the scent of pinecones as I walked off. I don’t know if I would have discerned their perfume at all in those moments minus her existence.
It must have also seemed to me back then, as it would to anybody young, certain and naïve driving or walking by that woman every morning and seeing her alone with her dog – chain smoking – that she was lonely. Correspondingly, that neither she nor anyone who loved her had disposable money to buy a new warm (maybe smaller sized) trench coat or to replace her either over-washed or never-washed faded blue annual summer cardigan.
I even once told my friend, when he helped me dump the garbage out one morning and we both waved at her, that I thought she took her beauty for granted in the sense that she didn’t do much to enhance it’s already-there-edness. Like, if she fixed her hair or something. My friend squinted on a scratch on the side of my car, rubbing it with the palm of his hand vigorously, and said, “Why don’t you leave that poor lady alone? And what’s this new word you’ve got: there-edness??”
And so because I assumed all these things about her, out loud once but almost daily to myself, with time they all became as true in my mind as the color brown on the tree trunks standing on most spaces of that town’s un-flat grounds. My waves of “Good Day” to her became more sympathetic and my smiles subconsciously wider with even a slight purse as if to say, “Yeah, I know.”
I told myself that I did not obsess over the following thought: that I felt she needed warmth in her life and that I gave it to her in that slightly pursed smile. But now I see that I was obsessing, at least during the time it took me to drive all the way down to the end of the windy road to the hustle and bustle of academic life on the flatter grounds of the town, or to walk back to my college flat.
One day, something happened, or I should say “un-happened”. I decided to do the seldom and take a walk. A stroll in the neighborhood has a reputation for coziness, and maybe therein hid the switch to my pineal gland! So I took a walk around the block that day rummaging along these thoughts while looking into peoples’ lives through their windows, on their balconies and in their front yards.
I discovered not much new along my journey, it was “pleasant” and “calming” as walks should be. I tried to breathe and think of the present now the way Zen people do. The now was everywhere and nowhere. But I knew that this whole growing up took time, so it did not frustrate me much. Nevertheless, the notion of walking back home was so convincing it started annoying me and I thought it useless to continue strolling much longer.
As I hiked back up the hill leading to my apartment building, I took a turn marked with “no car zone”, the left before the left to my place. Right before that turn is where that woman’s small house was.
I walked slower past it and snuck a peak into the leveled front porch leading to her door, hedged with bushes surrounded with a short white fence. The house was so close to the narrow cement sidewalk that I was able to see into a few flowerpots by the door, their soil was filled with stubbed cigarette butts, yet the large creamy peach peonies standing on them looked so plush and healthy.
Above the hurdle of pots near the entrance, there was a window open with metal bars painted in the color of aqua blue, only freshly chipped. Two wooden chairs were on each side of the window. I heard a man’s voice say: “… So what do you say to that?” and the woman’s voice responded, “Well, as long as there is hand-painting in the world…” and I couldn’t make out the rest.
That sounded like a fun conversation, honestly. But instead of thinking about her fun comment, I stood there for a while waiting for more words to draw a more valid picture of this woman’s life, and to come closer to actual reasons as to why she wouldn’t just get an ashtray rather than throw her cigarette butts in the soil in which her peach peonies grew (she obviously took good care of them), why she wouldn’t buy a new coat, why she wouldn’t do something about her hair, and why she was thinking of hand-painting as an important thing in the world? Also, who was this man in her life who defied my idea of her being lonely?
When I received no answers, I rushed back home shaking my head at how little I tried to activate my own pineal gland and how much I need to stop thinking of other peoples’ stories. In that instant, I suddenly felt so sick of the woman in my head that I never allowed her existence to distract me again. I concluded that I generally needed to care less about everything around me in order to quiet the noise in my mind. (What a silly girl I was).
The next day I was getting ready to leave for university and as I was tying the garbage bag to place it in the trunk of my car, I consciously made the decision to throw it in the hurdle of garbage containers that stood further down the hill, as to expel her from my life. I could see myself now, as if from above (sometimes from a side angle), nail-bitten fingers tying that black bag in a furious knot, nostrils flaring, and a forehead full of nerves struggling with much effort to stay un-creased, such adamancy!
I parted with the woman’s mystery and decided to focus on mechanical life. It was a senseless decision over a presence I magnified for some brief moments in my daily drive, and then made into nothing. Senseless in the sense that I shouldn’t have made her “aura” such a big deal to bring me to the point of wanting to make this decision to begin with. It became even more senseless when, driving down the road I drove down every single day at more or less the same time, I looked to see if she was there walking her dog and smoking, and she wasn’t.
She was not there then, and never again after. If I hadn’t witnessed the same moving trucks twice in the span of the two weeks following that day, and if I hadn’t shared my thoughts about her with my friend whose response seemed to have physically acknowledged her presence in the month preceding it, I would have started to think that the woman was just in my head. But she was real, and she was no longer around. What a coincidence it was, given that I had just decided to suspend her into the air!
So what then? Nothing then. For years, nothing! Reality makes it most probable that she was so irrelevant. For twelve years, some of which were still in that little town by the Alps, others of which were where I am now, nothing at all.
Until last week, (I am assuming the following, it is quiet a grand but highly likely assumption), when Facebook connected the town I moved away from (but never bothered to change as my “current hometown”), with a #hashtag of the town which she #hashtagged on her Facebook status. Go figure, the woman #hashtags!
She came up on the “People You May Know” list; my eyes widened with comical recognition of the wispy nest-y hair, now flatter and longer but still dry and makes her stand out as more liberated than your usual beautiful woman. I could see her face better on a screen, still beautiful to remind one how insignificant the poor state of her hair is.
Both of our faces didn’t seem to age a day, thank God for Botox – now that I fight age marks myself, I can tell that she definitely got her forehead injected – and all of a sudden her numerical age does matter, so I checked it. 45. I smiled (inwardly) at the thought of how intuitive of the Universe to have used a convenient modern cyber system like Facebook to say, “People you May Have Gotten to Know, You Fool”. How caught up with the times the Universe is!
Although she had a private account she had set it so that her status is visible to the public. That’s how I got to know something as intimate as “What she had on her mind” that day, which is what triggered the system to network us. She had posted a picture of herself hugging her dog in front of her house right down my street. She had neither the green trench coat nor the blue cardigan on. The flowerpots were visible; I zoomed in to see that they had no cigarette butts when that picture was taken. The caption of the picture read: RIP Charlie, I found you by the garbage in Lugano thirteen years ago, you became my treasure ever since. We lived together, and now we shall live apart. #lugano #lisbon #healer
I looked at the picture again, and I noticed that behind the woman, on the wall of her house, were indigo purple handprints all over. The house I drove by daily, for years, had handprints on its walls – small, overlapping hands in all shades thinkable ranging from a deep indigo to a pastel lavender, and I never noticed it!!
I knew it was a darker shade than the houses nearby. I also noticed the drab of her trench coat or cardigan that she constantly wore and never her shoes or pants. In the picture she wore Moncler winter boots, and the heels of her pants were also branded with the famous red, white and blue Moncler emblem.
I idolized the woman herself as the loneliest, untidiest and most ravishing woman in town, and I disregarded what else she could have meant aside from her lonely attire, her one gentle raised hand and the other fisted pocketed one, her admittedly ragged looking dog, and her persistent chain smoking. I felt so small and ashamed at the limited way I saw everything back then. Even after she moved out, I never noticed the wall, because I never looked again. But there was more…
On her Facebook cover photo, she posted a grainy picture of an orange-purple horizon and a soft purple sea with smooth blue ripples on the water with the words: “Your third eye lies in your brain. It looks like a pinecone and is the size of a grain of rice. It is the source of your wellbeing.” Her Facebook name is Dottoressa Penna. Her current hometown is Lisbon, Portugal. And there was nothing more on her page aside from this that told me more about her.
Now here I am, thinking of how bizarre this whole thing is becoming, given that only 4 months ago did I finally decide to study the emotional brain and its’ effect on our bodies, and maybe even get certified to practice in imaginary divisions of the quantum physics field that do not yet exist. At first I felt disappointed in myself when I remembered how I brushed away the presence of this woman down the road those many years ago, when she was undoubtedly there to serve me and my tiny pineal gland.
If I were to reach out to her now, like write her a Facebook message that I often said hello to her by the clearing where I dumped my garbage in Via Alla Sguancia, and that I wish to speak to her about her profession, would it satisfy me? Would I make use of this apparent sign? I don’t know.
But I find it more adventurous to leave this string unattached in my life. So that I may always go back to it, dangle it in front of my eyes, and know only this: Everything you ask for is already there, sometimes it’s not so hidden. Sometimes it’s just a feeling you get from the greeting of one persistent hand smoking a cigarette, that will stay raised as if it’s blessing you. But because the road bends and your steering wheel has to consciously turn with it so that you don’t go off-hill, you ignore that feeling and run the risk of living a predictable life.
You could have otherwise listened beyond the noise, stepped on the brakes, reversed, and tied the loose strings in your life whose corresponding ends maybe somewhere along the sidewalk, doing something as common and ungodly as chain-smoking near where you dump your usual garbage.
But you did what you already did; you hung those loose strings above you like Chinese lamps flying into a silent indigo morning carrying wishful thoughts – suspended in midair only to remind you that what could have been apparently did not happen, but the so much more that can now be instead is right within your grasp.
Cara Dottoressa Penna,
I shall not ghost you again after I write this. And obviously I won’t dare send it; our world is too conventional to find that sane. I won’t check your Facebook page again to avoid the risk of pinning you to your numerical age by mistake – Botox or not, numerical age is lethal.
When I was a young girl searching for a pinecone in my brain, little did I know that it was dug in the soil of your peony flowerpots right under those pinched cigarette tips you cleaned up for the picture you posted. Or it could have even been on the edges of the purple prints of your hands on a wall behind you that my eyes did not want to see no matter how much they tried.
The universe connected us and disconnected us and reconnected us only to tell me how late I am: we were on one and the same realm when the universe first connected us by the garbage containers – searching for that damn gland in our brains. Except you seem to have found it. And I still didn’t. I see now why not.
I sincerely apologize that I didn’t notice what your hands had printed on the wall behind you, and the perfect color you chose for that time in my life back then, and still perfect for this time, now: The color of the magical third eye. It was because there was no reflection there of me on the wall, you see? My reflection was only in the scruffy resilient image of you. Please take that as a compliment.
I created your limited-ness because I needed to reflect mine against someone, something. Now I know that each time the warmth of my smile lingered slightly longer sympathetically, it was for me, not for you. So I won’t beat myself up.
Facebook says you were an artist, a healer, you did fun things, you studied the mind, you became a doctor of it, and you mastered the ease in life because the state of your hair combined with the state of your flowerpots say so.
Thanks for choosing to post that picture of you and Charlie in Lugano rather than one together in Lisbon. I secretly think that choice was made just for me, too bad you will never know it. Well at least the Internet does, since our lives are both hashtagged with #lugano.
Although we are now miles and lifetimes apart, there is a massive part of us still there in Via alla Sguancia simultaneously. You’re standing there on the sidewalk of the road down my old apartment building with one hand raised possibly to become a friend, or perhaps have a mindful conversation, surely to help a girl with potential.
Instead, all you remain is a picture, a symbol… a Statue of Liberty. You came back with Moncler pants and a backdrop of a hand-painted wall that was never seen, yet always was. Just to prove that I was wrong back then, and that I should be on the right track now, now that I see the wall. From now on, and as long as there is hand painting in the world, we shall mark with our hands the color of the thoughts that we are on the walls that surround us, no matter how hard it is to erase the footprints of the thoughts that we are not, beyond them.
Grazie Dottoressa. Ci vediamo mai.
Written on November, 2019
Beisan's Burble 