Somewhere You Already Know

There is somewhere that has a single room, many rooms, and some days no rooms at all. The floor is carpeted or tiled, but always cold, as if it has never been walked upon before. The ceiling is high and low and somewhere in between all at once. The wallpaper is beige, the kind that is forgettable up until it isn’t and the wallpaper is blue, a soft, pale blue that might have meant to be calming.

Today, there is a single room. The floor is carpet with a tile pattern and the walls are equally beige and blue, fully neither, but clearly both. On one wall a mirror stands. It’s the height of a person, the sort of freestanding mirror that belongs in a bedroom or dressing room. The room isn’t reflected upon its surface. Instead, there is a hand, closing around a cream-colored folder. The hand opens the folder, makes a note, closes the folder. The scene is equally faceless as it is voiceless. There is only the hand, large enough to fill the middle section of the mirror.

The hand disappears and is replaced by a door. A closed door, light shining around its frame and beneath it a shadow passes right then left then right again. Something moves on the other side of that door, but the door remains still, the light the only sign of movement beyond.

When the door disappears, a window replaces it. It fogs, then clears, then fogs again. The same motion, the same clarity, and the same obscurity.

The mirror repeats the three scenes. Always faceless, always focused on a single action, repeated again and again.

On another wall is a window. Similar to the window in the mirror, but different all the same. It is shut and the curtains are wide open, the same beige-blue of the wallpaper, so close in shade and texture, it might not have been curtain at all. The glass is bare, wiped clean without even the hint of scratch or smudge. There is no light outside the window, only a formless darkness. And yet the window casts a shadow upon the tiled carpet: an unmistakable square cloth moving in small circles across the shadow of the window.

Elsewhere in the room, neither here nor there, another shadow moves across the wallpaper with nothing to cast it. A hand hovers over a keyboard, types something, then moves on. No pauses, no lingering over keys, no hesitation in the decisions.

Another shadow shows a man walking past someone sitting with a hand out. The man neither looks down nor slows. He straightens and walks with purpose, head held high.

Another shadow follows a woman who takes a folder from one outstretched hand and, before she’s finished taking it, a second hand is already offering another. She accepts that one, too. And another. A pile of folders from different hands.

These shadows are without face, name, and voice. But none are any less real.

Two people who are barely more than shadows stand in a kitchen that isn’t a kitchen. That same changing wallpaper lines the wall and that same tile-patterned carpet covers the floor.

“If you say so,” one of them says, clearly but quietly. Then leans into a fridge, already reaching in, already moving on.

The other doesn’t answer. Not with words. He laughs, but it’s the kind that is reflexive and devoid of humor. The kind that is aimed at the floor and meant to fill silence rather than respond. And then the moment moves on and neither person seems aware of what that moment has cost them.

Somewhere beyond, the outline of a door emerges from the wallpaper. Slowly and quietly, the wallpaper fades gradually into hard wood. The door cracks open.