Downstairs.
It surrounds me. Suffocates me. Just like the rain.
I climb the stairs, passing closed doors, the soft squeak of my sneakers sounding out with every step.
My door is red. Like the color of blood.
Dripping from the ceiling. I swim in the blood. I can smell it. I can taste it. She laughs because it means she’s free. I cower because it will destroy us.
Red, red everywhere…
I hate the door. It’s chipped and dirty, and someone sprayed graffiti on it many years ago. I can’t even read what it says anymore, and that annoys me. Irritates me to my core. I’ve stared at it for hours, trying to work out what it says. It was either that or burn it down. Because it’s red like blood. So red it burns my eyes. I know it’s not important, not to anyone but me. But to me it consumes. It takes over.
I could paint the door. A nice brown. Maybe yellow.
But I don’t.
Because red is the color of memory.
“Are you all right?” No. I’m not. I never will be again…
I stare at the faded black words of the graffiti, tracing a finger over the letters that make sense. Something and then anrand then something else and ane. Rainwater drips from my hair and into my eyes, and I blink it away.
A door opens on the floor above me, and I look up the stairs, wondering who it is. I live on the third floor of a five-story building. There are twenty apartments with no vacancies. The people in my building aren’t all bad. They’re notalldrug dealers and pimps, hoes and crackheads. There are some families, mothers and fathers trying to make a decent life for their children. Bad mistakes in their youths led them down this dark path, and I can sympathize with that.
But it’s not enough,I want to tell them.
Because it’s not enough, and it never will be.
Your kids will all cry behind locked doors too one day,I think.
One of the prostitutes from upstairs comes down. I know she’s a prostitute because she fucks all night long. One man after another. One fuck fades into the next. I hear her bed slamming against the wall and scraping against the floorboards at all times of the night. I hear their grunts of shame and I hear her moans. Her cries of pleasure and sometimes pain.
I sometimes jack off to the sounds when I can’t sleep. It feels dirty. And wrong. And then I’m grunting in shame too.
Her eyes meet mine and I attempt a smile. But she doesn’t smile back. So I open my door and go inside, shutting her out of my world.
You don’t belong in here with me anyway,I want to say.
None of them do.
This world is only for me.
