By mid-morning I was in the middle of a moderate panic attack. Perhaps the stress of everything that was beginning to catch up. I probably could have run away somewhere dark curled up under a bed. But I had meetings and had to act brave. I walked straight through a glass door and broke my nose and walked for an hour with my nose covered in ice to stop the bleeding.
The gift from that encounter? A massive headache.
***
Just because I don't say it doesn't mean I am not. After lunch, I sat in my car and watched the cold gray sky. I will learn to drive around the curves without making my passengers sick.
Take a deep breath. The day is yet not over.
***
I walked past the store twice. Each time, I would backtrack and return to the same spot. I was walking aimlessly around town for the last hour. I had enough quarters inserted into the parking meter to cover two hours. I don’t know what I was looking for. Perhaps a dark suit, as if I was going to a funeral. But I was not going to a funeral and I didn’t need a suit. There was a swimwear shop right next to Men’s Warehouse, and the ad displayed at the window, in larger font size and with a color picture read, “What a girl wants, To have the best swimwear.”
It showed a blond woman on the right side frozen in mid step with a wide smile on her face. There were beads of water around her spilling into the rest of the page and onto the letters without smudging them. Plastic beads of water danced around the page without falling off. She didn’t particularly look happy to have what she ostensibly wanted, the best swimsuit. May be the swimsuit she was wearing was not the best, I reasoned, and that is why she is coming out the water looking for what she really wants. The shopgirl came to the window and looked at me with a halfsmile.
The day was too cold and gray. I kept walking down the street away from the nicer part to the dodgier areas, past the nice-looking shops and restaurants until the place decidedly took a downturn. Pawnshops, adult book stores and seedy furniture stores took the place of boutiques and Thai restaurants. I looked out of place but I didn’t care. I looked out of place because I was dressed in a suit and I had no winter coat. I took a side street and walked in front of small single floor houses with iron grills on the windows. There was an eerie violence in the air, which I am sure, was all in my head.
I am going to a funeral, I said to myself, and continued walking. On the street corner, there was a tear graffiti painted on a wall. Under it, there was a photo of a young man left on the sidewalk by a grieving family member with assorted candles and dried flowers. This part of the city loses people regularly to senseless death; gang violence, police violence or getting shot by being trapped between a shooter and an intended victim. There was no method to this madness, people simply dropped dead at nineteen or twenty and their friends added another tattoo on their bodies as a living memorial to the fallen friends. The shooter probably added a tattoo too, as a memory of his act. The police went home and calculated their retirement income. The mothers grieved and left pictures on the sidewalk where their sons fell. Los Angeles Times covered these stories in the city sections sometimes where the stories were sandwiched between the ubiquitous anti-emigration and urban proliferation stories.
At the end of the road, there was a hedge that covered a boarded-up house and its unsightly overgrown yard. The road ended on a T-junction, and I decided to turn right. A woman came out of her door into the front porch and looked at me. She was in her fifties and wore a dark shapeless matronly dress. There was a picture of Jesus on the wall of the porch and an empty place where another picture had been. The empty spot was darker with a strange stain that looked like the forehead of a man. It felt like a house that was comfortable with loss.
I felt that this was the funeral that I was searching. The funeral of time and gray winters. I stood there for a minute not knowing what to do.
Then I turned around and started walking back to my car.
