Pipes

She puts my face between her old, stiff hands and plants a kiss on both my cheeks. Her lips are dry, but her smile is warm, and I can't help but hold onto her for just a second longer after our embrace.

"You look just like my granddaughter," she says, her kind eyes resting on my face.

Her vision, like the rest of her body, is deteriorating, and she isn't really seeing me like everyone else sees me (I look nothing like an Italian and I'm sure nothing like her granddaughter), but something about the way her face softens when I'm in her presence makes everything okay.

"The pipes in this building are breaking down," she comments, wiping a drop of sweat off her forehead with her wrist. I too am sweating, and I comment that the place also needs a new paint job. It looks like a run down psychiatric hospital, its stained sea foam green walls peeling and withering.

"This place is really old," I say.

"Not at all," she replies, dismissing my comment with a wave of her hand. I realize how absurd the term 'old' must sound to her.

Her soul houses a lifetime of painful memories - a lost childhood, a husband who taught her lessons with his fists (she still has the scars), and a mysterious killer in the 80's called aids that took away her daughter and son-in-law. Just to name a few.

Old has nothing on her soul.

She stands there in the hallway, her broom in hand, physically frail, but her mind is another story. The woman is nearly gone, but her memories live on, confirming my fear that the worst things in life you will never forget.

She asks about my boyfriend and how our first year of cohabitation is going.

"You're a good girl, and you love each other right?" she asks.

It's the one million dollar question, the one that all of the elderly residents in this complex ask me nearly every time they see me. After all the struggles I've suffered though as an immigrant - impossible legal documents, isolation, mean looks, and cruel behavior, love has never been quite enough to keep me happy here. And yet, they ask me, as if in the end, it's the only thing that matters.

I'm skeptical.

But maybe they know something we don't.

She's looking at me, without smiling, waiting for an answer. She's lasted this long, and she's lost everything, but she still thinks there's hope for us.

"Yes, we do," I nod, "very much."

"Good," she says, and for now it's enough.

In a way, I wish this moment could go on longer because I know that once she disappears behind her door, I may never see her again, and she'll never know that I care about everything she has been through, even though I don't know her. We say goodbye to each other and leave, each behind creaking doors - me in the elevator, and her in her apartment, both of us unwillingly, but forced, to face another day alone.




5.27.12
(conceived July 2011)