“All of this is true” was written neatly in black dry-erase marker on the glass of the sliding door. Beyond it, the balcony, the railing, the street, and the big corner gas station with the floodlights that never went off (much to my irritation). Assorted traffic passing at appropriate speeds, low buildings across the street, a big chunk of sky — an urban tableau streaming in through the glass. Every glance out that aperture made a frame for the time-lapse video of my memory of this place. And every frame was pre-captioned: “All of this is true.”
It was a reminder. I was in the habit, in those angry days too, of peering out over the railing to watch some neglected, overfed body sashay down the block to my astonished internal chorus: “How does one live like that? / Please let me never know.” Or, in the middle of the night, moonlighting as an insomniac and blaming it on the blazing bulbs across the street: “How can they be so cruel / What is wrong with the world?”
At night, the words cast their shapes in the light onto the backside of the pale curtains. But vibrations — whether from the unmuffled motorbikes at the biker bar next to the gas station, or subtler forces — might alter the light’s refraction through the glass, projecting new messages onto the cloth.
“Things could be different, but they’re not,” it said once, flickering. “Accept it, and go from there.”