mulher

          The color of her dress changes every time I think about her. Green. Orange?  She’s strutting, one foot placed in front of the other, silent commanding clacks of heels on age-old brick, this plaza in Lisbon her fucking runway. She has an inscrutable expression: eyes hinting at a life long lived, skin worn down by the sun and wind. The muscles around her eyelids are relaxed. She looks ahead, and only straight ahead, as she moves. Maybe the dress had flowers—blue flowers. Green? Joined at her hip is her husband. I don’t remember what he looks like. Red plaid button-up tucked under brown cargo pants, belt. That could be entirely made up. He glances—up, the slightest bit—at her from time to time, walks in a restrained scurry to match her catwalk. Their mouths are moving, whispering insignificant things to each other as lovers do. Maybe just to hear the sound of the other’s voice. As people pass this small shop window, where I stand cowering, their conversations dare to reveal themselves to me—phone calls with coworkers, children screaming, street vendors chirping, ringing laughs—before they crawl back into the general human noise. But these lovers stay in their own world, inaudible to reality and reality irrelevant to them—glass mountains she carries around her and hers. The road out of the plaza veers sharply downward. A little horizon, under which the woman’s head slowly, slowly drowns. 

          I remember wanting her story. If I were more brashly arrogant, or perhaps if I were quick enough on my feet to have devised an excuse, I could have approached her and asked her so many questions: Who are you? How did you get here? How do I live as you live? But no such thing happened. She, the unknowable, and I, the tourist, were strung to our separate ways, meeting only at that trivial moment. Absent a story, I left with a conviction: I must come back.

—

          In my dreams, the plaza stretches to infinity. From a poet’s bronze statue sat atop towering limestone—the singularity—this path of glimmering patterned stone bursts forth: Past À Brasileira, past Livraria Bertrand, it curves not down but up, stabbing the misted heavens with a great force. Flanked on both ends by marble buildings, nondescript, the woman is by herself. Her dress is green. She looks back at me. A cigarette wisps away between her fingers. Her eyebrows are tense—the rest of her face unchanged.

          “What are you waiting for?” she asks.

          I can’t, I want to say. I have a whole life behind me, a whole life ahead of me. Here.

          But my lips don’t move.

          “Look behind you.”

          Everything is burning. The poet’s statue is melting. Bombs rain from the sky. Screams and gunshots ring over the crackling of fire. Everyone I have ever loved is under the rubble.

          She takes a long drag of the cigarette. 

          “What are you waiting for?” she asks again. 

          I want to refuse. I want to believe the rubble is my home. But my lips don’t move. And she only stares at me, letting out smoke in a narrow breath. Then she flicks the cigarette onto the ground and stomps it. She holds out her hand. Her eyebrows relax again. The sun is so bright.

          “What are you waiting for?”

          And I wake up in a burning bed. And I am reaching for her hand. And I am reaching for her hand. And I am reaching for her hand. And I am reaching for her hand. 

—

          The next morning, after I first saw her, there was no trace of the woman. But I saw the woman’s face everywhere I went. The first time I noticed, there was a crowd cheering on three men taking turns breakdancing. I thought I recognized them. I stopped in my tracks, transfixed suddenly. No, their faces were just as they were; but whenever they stood up laughing after their turn they briefly glimmered, and I could swear they had the woman’s face then, and in those flashes I would remember the dream, and my heart would reach for the sun.

          I walked, then I ran, up and down the cobbled streets, scanning faces. A mother selling trinkets. A violinist playing, quite slowly and out of tune. A frazzled man with husks for eyes, sitting on the curb, chain-smoking away. They all had the woman’s face. Or maybe I just wanted them to have the woman’s face. Maybe none of it was real. Maybe I wanted it to be real. My feet kept moving.

          At some point I came back to the same place I started. It was cold. European summer heat had been unrelenting, but today it decided to let up. There was an open table at À Brasileira. I took my seat and ordered an espresso. A tiny cup came clanging, with sugar on the side—just how they liked it here. I took a sip. Bittersweet, dark. I looked up at the poet. I knew now what it meant to feel a longing for nothing but too long, a loneliness in the midst of people, a never-feeling-pleased when pleased. I gave the poet a scowl, as if to tell him as much. He said nothing back. He had the woman’s face, too.

          On my last day, I was rushing to the airport, having slept through my alarm, now a hair away from missing my flight. I barged through the entrance, a frenzy of backpack and suitcase. Taking a quick breath at the escalator as it pulled me up, I looked back at the departures floor slowly growing smaller behind me. I noticed a woman that was about to leave. She had a green dress. I think. There was a man next to her. They were laughing about something. Then she looked up at me. I looked back. And we stayed like that for a few seconds. I was sure she had some kind of twinkle in her eye, as if to say something that I had already heard before. Then she disappeared again. The escalator was still going.

Jonathan Park is a senior majoring in applied and computational mathematics, with a minor in cybersecurity. He was born and raised in the Bay Area. Most days he reads The New Yorker. Sometimes he takes photos and posts them to his Instagram. You can follow Jonathan on Instagram here.