All those faces. Who are they? I barely recognize half of them. Who is that whispering lady in the trenchcoat? I’ve never even seen the family behind me before. Or the tense man in dripping rain gear, who is hiding in the furthest corner. How ignorant! If he won’t take off the coat and hang it up to dry, it will eventually flood the marble tiles to drown us all in here, but he doesn’t really move.
Neither does the air. Someone should open a window. They look fixed. Can you even tilt them? Maybe the brightly painted ones beside me that glow with color as soon as sunlight touches them. Pity that it’s raining: no light in here, no air, and certainly no colors. Except – on me. Why did I choose to wear this blouse today? It sticks to my skin, because I’m sweating and either way, it is way too colorful for a place like this. What will they think of me?
Screw them! She’d always tell me she cannot stand people. At least most of them, and I thought I was exempt – something special. Quite clearly, though, I am not – otherwise all the others wouldn’t be here right now. She must have made them feel just as special as me. Hasn’t she just always been exceptional at that?
How do you do that, I wonder? How to become Lina? She used to have this way of reassuring others that the world would stop turning without them. Just like she had a way of convincing them that every breath they took was a waste of time. With her, you’d always have to wait and see which one of those you’d get. Tough to be around her, even tougher to have her as a friend, and here I am in the first row – one of her closest – wondering if she has ever really been mine and maybe that I have to wonder is enough of an answer.
I asked her today. Devastating that she kept silent and won’t ever be able to give me a reply. Then again, she’d always silence out things that could reveal how she’d really feel. I guess she has just never been the sharing type. How have I known her for all those years, without ever figuring out which of her many sides was genuine?
I know her just enough to miss her if she were ever gone, I thought, but then she stopped texting and she stopped ringing and we stopped meeting up in the evenings. Why did I not miss anything during the past few weeks? We used to spend every second day together, and there is no one in the world who has ever known more about me than her.
Maybe it’s not about her at all. Could it really be about me? Have I not been a friend to her? It might have been my fault. If I had the chance again, I would do it differently. I should have known. Everything about her, and maybe then I could have foreseen the things that have happened to her recently.
Things like this often happen within a set circle of friends, said the police. Did she suddenly change? Was she somehow afraid? When they asked me, I couldn’t tell, because yesterday’s Lina was never today’s and maybe neither one of them has had enough faith in me to really let me see her.
© Sima B. Moussavian 2022-07-15