*** ‘Vignette City’ is an ongoing project of daily writing and urban photography ***
The city has been running The Story Booth Project for a few years, but I have never participated. There are a dozen booths around the city. About the size of a photo booth that you can step inside and you sit down and type in your information and then the green light comes on and you tell your story. The cops are pretty good about making sure that the homeless people don’t sleep in them, so they’re usually pretty clean. I don’t know why I’d never done it. It was a big thing, popular and trendy, when the city first set them up. I remember seeing lines of people waiting to record their bit. People in this city seem to love lining up for things. Fancy donuts, fancy tofu, local hybrid cheeses. I’ve never understood it.
There’s a box down by my office and it was rainy today, so maybe that’s why I decided to step inside and slide the door closed. It was nice to take a load off and so I just sat there on the little bench and I listened to the rain tink off the thin plastic roof of the box.
The green light made a clicking noise when it flipped on and I realized I was being recorded, which I guess I knew was going to happen.
“I just wanted to sit down and get out of the rain for a minute,” I said to the square mirror that had a camera behind it. Then I just looked at my own reflection in that mirror and I was a little surprised because the light in the box wasn’t great and the mirror was cheap and so I didn’t quite look like the person I was used to seeing in my bathroom mirror every morning. The person who was looking back at me had a lot in common with the people i the old black and white photos my mother had hanging up in her bedroom. I looked like someone had taken all those people and mixed them like their faces were cake batter and the result was a cake that looked kind of like me. I looked so much older than I was used to seeing myself. I was older than any of my dead family was in those pictures.
“There are so many people in the family pictures my mother always had hanging in her bedroom, “I said to the mirror. “I never knew any of them because we came up here where when I was a baby, but they’re all dead now. And my mother, she died. Adn I never knew my father or his side of the family. There were always so many faces, you know, on my mother’s wall and I don’t really know any of their names. I just took all the pictures down the other day. I don’t know who, I don’t know who I’m supposed to call. None of them ever came to this country. It was just me and my mother. I don’t know why she decided this was the place to start over. She was, I think, 19 when she came here. Three jobs, you know, the whole time i was a kid. She taught me how to cook, I was maybe 6, she taught me because she needed me to be able to cook for both of us, because she either didn’t have time or she was tired as a dog when she was home. She came up here, I know, to get away from her family and to get away from the home country, but really I know that she came up here because she wanted me to be able to have a better life. She, did all that, she made the needs of her own life secondary to the needs of mine, I guess. She moved up here, I know, because she wanted me to have a better life. She gave up her life. Basically. She, she did that for me and now, I guess I’m me. And what does that amount to? I have … I don’t know, a life. It’s a totally normal life. I go to work. I go to the gym. I watch TV. She didn’t tell me what I’m supposed to do to make all the sacrifice she made worth it. And now I can’t ask her. She did all this work so I could have a life and my life … it’s fine. It’s not good, it’s not bad. I have a nice couch. I really like it. It’s probably my favorite thing that I own. I like to sit on it. That’s probably when I’m happiest. I like to sit on my couch and watch TV. That’s all I really want to do. So it that what it was about? Is that what the point was? Did she bust her ass her whole life so that I could just basically sit comfortably? What sense does that make?”
And that’s when I realized I’d been talking for awhile and so I wiped my nose with my sleeve and I said, “Anyway, I just wanted to get out of the rain. It looks like it has let up a little bit.”
Then I slid the door open and the green light clicked off and I walked away and I really wish I hadn’t recorded any of that.
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