BEHIND THE BEIGE WALL

Everything feels old again. I'm tired of the routine, bored with the content. However, I know it's just a temporary decline in brain function. The connections between neurons are imperfect, after all, and a decrease in the level of this protein or that hormone can intensify depression.

In moments like these, I prefer not to leave the house. Someone would still report my character flaw. After all, like any decent citizen, I have a full medicine cabinet to correct everything that still works.

Sigh, again... I think I've started talking to myself. But that's normal for me. After all, I experienced a trauma at the age of three months. If it happened today, I could demand enormous compensation for this oversight. Fortunately, the Citizens' Mental Health Act wasn't in force back then. Coming back to my own experience, ever since then, I've preferred to focus on my own experiences, which, unfortunately, has been deemed a crime against civil society. For this reason, I don't like leaving the house. Especially if I don't take my "corrective" medication. I haven't been taking it often lately...

The phone. It's ringing. Again.

And my hands are so small. I can't handle my responsibility. My unstable mind suggests various scenarios. The beige wall seems nonexistent. I'm almost certain I could walk through it. But what would I see on the other side?

It was ringing. Wait, the phone was ringing!

I'm already beyond the wall. Below, a lawn, shrouded in the slumbering shadow of awakening trees. Beyond, a sidewalk leading to "left" or possibly "straight ahead."

But does it matter? I don't even know where the boundary is. The boundary of the wall and the boundary of the air. The second floor isn't high, after all. Grass. Cold and slightly damp. It tickles me, even though I can't be seen. But I hear it, I hear it again.

The phone. No, not the phone!

People, lots of people. They're walking along the sidewalk, pretending to care about something. It's ridiculous. The sidewalk has always been there. Or at least since yesterday. I smiled involuntarily. People are divided into private and public. Each of us is both. But on the sidewalk, almost everyone is painfully public. The street is a different story. There, in a slight distraction, we return "to ourselves." If only for a split second...

My joy quickly left me. The faces of the city's wanderers absorbed my visual perception. Oh no! Those stupid words again...

Calmly and from the beginning: "The faces of passersby caught my attention" or "I noticed the faces of passersby." I breathed a sigh of relief. I feel better already. Only the shaking in my hands...

I return to the faces. They are ordinary, yet they conceal something. But this is so blatantly obvious. Everyone would now expect a psychological description of a woman aged 32 years, 9 months, and 13 days. Perhaps she had experienced this and that, perhaps she had been persecuted, or perhaps she had tormented someone? These days, such questions no longer arise. The doctor, implementing the act on social psychological balance, probably prescribed her something for marital happiness or maternal instinct. Something to quell pride or instill courage.

But where is the analysis of the true face? I'm growing impatient myself. Surely something must exist. But how can an arbitrary judgment be validated? How much fiction is there, and how much is probable reality? My hands are so frail...

There are no people left. The sidewalk is full of facts. Complaints written in a book of reports. Everyone wants to add something, but no one wants to read. No one wants to know. Selfish thoughts. So why talk about them?

The beige wall terrifies me so much. The phone rings. But not in my apartment.