by Jesse Raub
Shuffled #8

Much of life is spent looking out windows.  So when I “retired” I moved back to the States and bought a small house in Missouri on a high bluff overlooking a deep bend of the Mississippi.  I had them install a large bay window with a bench so I could sit and watch the river.

At first it was weird to be sedentary after my life of whimsy and travel.  Now I’m the old lady that lives up the road.  A few children visit from time to time, selling cookies or wreaths or wrapping paper.  I have so much wrapping paper in my hall closet that it falls out onto me every time I open the closet door to put more in.  It’s strange to think that wrapping paper storage is a prime concern.

In my younger years there were plenty of opportunities for a young, attractive American girl with little to no inhibitions cavorting across Europe.  The people I met, the distraction the whole thing provided—things like shelter and eating were an afterthought.  A beautiful Italian boy would smuggle you into his room at his parents apartment through a window.  An aging Spaniard desperate for company who owned a small house down the lane, but would walk behind you the entire way, his eyes searing into the flesh of your buttocks through the loose linen skirt.  When you’re young you trade what you have, and I had my sexuality and little else.

Still, I have no regrets.  I was tied down by nothing and carried my world in a travel case, tucked beneath my train seat, leaving each city with a sense of accomplishment.  But it comes back to me from time to time.  When I close my eyes sometimes I can hear that voice, smell the whiskey on his breath, feel the pressure of his hand closed over my mouth as I tried to call out.

It defined my life at the time.  I let it.  I was “American Rape Victim.”  Years of bitterness, repentance, and anger and shame followed.  It was a red haze that I couldn’t erase from my mind.  I broke a wine bottle across the back of a pushy Irishman in bar in Hungary.  No matter how much I drank, how much pot I smoked, how many painkillers I swallowed dry in a dark alley, I could kill the pain but the memory remained.  And I realized that I could let it define my life for the time, but I couldn’t let it define me.

I’ve got my health, at least.  I was lucky enough for that, even if I lost the nature that allowed me to live the life I did.  The bliss was gone, but the need for it faded just as quick as the bliss itself faded.  You find yourself in tune to a certain contentedness and aware of the minute beauty in life—pressing your fingers through the topsoil of your garden, the steam off the top of a fresh cup of tea.  But sometimes, after buying more wrapping paper at the front door, I move to the bay window and stare at the river, watching the water curve over rocks from two hundred feet above and thinking to myself I could still go anywhere.

“The Chalet Lines” by Jesse Raub is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

“The Chalet Lines” is a short fiction interpretation of the Belle and Sebastian song of the same name from the album Fold Your Hands Child You Walk Like A Peasant, released through Jeepster Records in the year 2000. It is the eighth story written as part of the Shuffled series, in which inspiration is chosen by random computerized algorithms on a well stocked iPod.