The Girl in the Elevator

The doorbell rings, and she’s set from her revelry, has it already been seven years? It dings again, and she realizes the use of that concern, she’s keeping them up whoever is by her door.

“Hello, I wasn’t-” she looks down at the box, seeing that she didn’t need to sign for anything. In any case she’s glad she didn’t have to talk to anyone that day. Resurgent grief was a really unfair thing to share with a stranger.

She picked up the box, and reentered her home. Whatever was in the box could wait until noon, after lunch and coffee, and the worst movies her lost friend had ever made her watch. She was still just a mammal; it was alright to hide when she felt hurt.

She took her day in stride otherwise, commemorating a time she should’ve forgotten. Why she knew something like that couldn’t be remarked upon, as no one else knew.

Seven years. 

She could join a nunnery if she wanted. She wonders for a moment, tasting the sweet tinge of her coffee, if she’d even be able to walk on hallowed ground.

She can’t open the box today. 

Rest is becoming when the day is done, though there’s nothing much else to be said. The sky opens up in her dreams that night, stars in daylight eating the moon, she’s lonely in there. Wherever she is.

The doors open in a squeaking slide, and she sees nothing inside the lift. She thinks it’s a memory, or maybe invented, she doesn’t remember when it is, either way.

She walks in, and sees Maaya in the hall, she is smiling, and her teeth are larger than they should be.

There are short words that she can only feel in her throat.

The doors don’t close as the cabin moves, Maaya waves watching. Playful like always.

As she sinks down.

Confusion is not dissimilar to bliss, and to feel this way might save your life. Such wisdom lives in the moments between sleep and light. Most distortions are lost thereafter. 

Another day, another morning, and she is alone in her house. Late work hours leave some wiggle room to her day, as she goes about her business. She spares a look, to the box in the corner, but she won’t open it today.

She leaves, and she doesn’t bother to think, as she rushes out the door. She felt lazy before her dream, like her body was made of water, muggy and stagnant.

Now she was on her way to work, in well-worn shoes and a thoughtless gate.

Everything had been dry so far, and made that feeling lessen to the point that she knew it was only hers.

If there’d been an addendum to this assessment it would only be that she was supposed to be the water, not inconvenienced by it. Though certainly the distinction wouldn’t come to matter.

Work wears thin her thoughts, and she doesn’t notice how dreary the weather goes before it’s over.

She looked down at her door drenched from the walk home, she was tired, but she still saw it. A little box, large enough to be left at anyone’s door, though if she thought about it, it would be silly to leave something smaller. 

She wasn’t sure when it could have arrived, between the hours, or before. She thought nothing of it, as she unlocked her door, she needed to put her things away before anything else.

Still she kicked it across the lip of her doorway, she hadn’t been expecting anything, and it was hardly her loss if she broke its contents.

She walked around it as her doorway fell closed.

It ends up set against that same far corner, next to the previous day's parcel. The day before.

She doesn’t think to open them, it would distract from her selfcare. She had dishes to wash, stories to listen to. And really there was nothing in them that could account for her curiosity.

But soon her sink is empty, and her entertainments heard, she had nearly lost all excuse for this strange avoidance. That is except for a shower, she’d been wet before, unhappy, and gross from her day.

This would work well enough in the moment, though it ended quickly as all things do, but by then she’s tired enough to sleep strewn on her towel over her bed. She could open them in the morning, her body had decided that for her.

She hears the doorbell, and the roll of closed eyes beneath her mind’s wide open. She feels her body as it doesn’t move to it, though it feels so close against her ear. 

That’s her phone, and really, she doesn’t know why she’s disappointed by the answerer, “-why haven’t you called?”

She can’t even say the feeling is unfamiliar, her mother’s voice tamping down at an ignorance neither could correct. “Sorry, I’ve been busy.” she says, though she’s done so little.

The voice becomes a buzzing monotony, the memory of conversation before her mother’s voice can even pass her other ear. She’d love to say she’d not been listening, but she was almost certain nothing was said, even as the door went missing and the air became dry.

She carves herself from her dream in the same manner that tied her down. She turns from her work, whatever it was, and to the doorway, where the boxes had been kicked past.

There was a secret she hid from herself, a small one, at this point it was untouchable.

But still, it would be pointless to leave the boxes unopened by her door.

That is until she woke, warm enough and sickened by the thought. What a wrong way she turned over and off, and out of her room with little fanfare.

She finds the boxcutter before her toothbrush and so she takes her lumps.

With a careful quick slip of the blade against the packing tape, she opened the larger of the two boxes.

First finding a letter in an envelope, and something that was very well insulated. She opens the envelope finding an empty note, blank paper. That’s less confusing.

Maybe?

She puts the paper down before deconstructing the box and its contents.

It was alcohol. Wine and Gin with obscure labels.

It was strange enough that she’d have it, but getting it free from a box was the kind of thing that implied well-intentioned poisoning, or at least intended.

But she still smiles, thinking for a moment about the logic of a day for remembrance ending with a trip to the hospital.

She could wonder what she was smiling about, but instead she went on to open the other.

An umbrella.

That was a whole lot more sensible, but she still didn’t know why it had been sent.

Why she was almost angry that it was offered, meant to be offered yesterday.

Why would she be angry?

She hears the doorbell, and goes to answer it. There’s no one there. No one to greet her, no box at her feet, she looks around expecting to hear the giggle of a prankster, she expects it like she was meant to.

And then it’s there.

At her feet.

Worse than a larking dingus, it was another box.

She picks it up, more carefully than the others and puts it down near where they all lay by her chair. She looks down at it for a while expecting to disregard it, to let the thought of it fester like its predecessors.

But she opens it right up.

It’s empty.

For a second she decides it’s a joke, falters and waits for the thing to miraculously become full. But it doesn’t. and so she sits back down, wondering why she even bothered with that stolen moment.

She decides to drink the wine, then the gin, than the little push pull of her body against gravity.

She thinks she’ll make coffee after, but that’s really not.

She thinks she hears the doorbell ring, and she looks over at the note.

At what was written while in her self-pity.

“If you’re anything like you were before, you’ll have read this already, but a lot can change in these kinds of deals. I’m sorry it’s been so long.

I need to see you again.”

She folds it up, puts it away. She doesn’t take it seriously until she’s already out the door.

Down the hall, and in front of the elevator.

“Please don’t do it.” She hears her friend’s voice. Her own.

She can only hope once she closes her eyes that night, that she really wakes up.