Portrait

I like trying to get into people’s heads, it’s always interesting. Imagine this; you’re walking down the street or sitting on a bench or something, and an old couple goes by. Married for god knows how many years, going home from the opera, or some vaguely intellectual dinner party or something. The woman, she’s got this glamorous severity about her, this kind of stern determination in her eyes. You can tell that she must have been beautiful in her youth. The man seems more mellow, less radical, less uncompromising. He seems like the kind of person who would listen to your problems and probably understand, or at least not get mad if he didn’t.

Anyways, you look at them and you wonder what the hell their lives must be like, when they’re not walking down the streets in fancy clothes or anything. I mean, what do they look like when they’re on their own, when nobody’s watching? What do they talk about? Do they even have anything left to say to each other? Or do they just sit on opposite ends of the dinner table, eat in silence, make the occasional comment on this person or that, just to keep up appearances, just so they can pretend that everything is fine? Do they still love each other? Did they ever? Does he have a mistress that she pretends not to know about? Or is it too late, even for that? You start to get miserable thinking about how, for all you know, they're both just waiting for death to come, hating each other but not having the guts to call it quits, because they're too scared to face the end on their own, but then, out of nowhere, he puts his arm around her shoulder and whispers something in her ear! She laughs, this adorable, almost guilty laugh, and for a second she’s 20 years old again. And he looks at her, and you can see in his eyes that to him she hasn’t aged a day, that he still sees her exactly like she was, all those years ago when they first met.

You look away, because it would be indecent to pry any further into their lives. And before long you see a young couple walk by. Or maybe not a couple yet, because their shoulders don’t quite touch, and their eyes never really meet, and if the back of their hands brushed against each other, it would probably be an accident. You can see the boy is painfully aware of the tiny space between them, you can see it in the way he pauses and looks at her tentatively every time he finishes saying whatever the hell it is he’s saying. You can see it in the relief in his eyes when she laughs at one of his jokes, you can see it in the way he listens to her, really listens, trying to understand not what she says so much as what she doesn’t say. The girl, she pretends not to notice any of this of course, she smiles and laughs, and is charming, but if you listen close enough, you can hear this excitement building in her voice, and if you look close enough, you can see this restlessness in the way she moves. Oh, I hope the boy has the courage to kiss her when the moment comes, I really do. I hope he doesn’t loose his nerve and look away when she starts to lean in and bat her eyelashes. I hope one day they’ll be an old couple walking down the street, going home from the opera, or some vaguely intellectual dinner party.