A bitter gust intrudes through the window from the Atlantic, causing me to shiver. I want to close the blind but I cannot bring myself. The total confinement would be too much. I would come face to face with temptation. It always lurks there in the back of my mind. It would be very simple, my hand enclosing the knob, and my body meeting the weight of the door. The strings would be cut, I would be liberated. I could leave this playhouse.
But for what? Where would I go? How would I live?
The outside world is dark, and I know that there is nothing quite so shaming as a marriage that has failed. Three years, and mine already a failure. All the things people would say. We did not get on. We were not suited to one another. I was too young, too inexperienced, not of his world. The fact I love him in a sad, desperate way, like a child or dog, does not matter. He does not belong to me, but rather I to him.
I don’t stay for his sake, no only for my own pride. I would be content to live in one corner and he in the other so long as the outside world should never know. If he had no more tenderness for me, never spoke to me except on matters of necessity, I believe I could bear it if I were certain that nobody knew of this but our own two selves.
From this narrative I wrote down a couple of points and these became themes that I explored further in a number of sketches.
- Looking outside in – impossible view. Peeking. Voyeuristic. This view is only possible because it is night and the interior is lit up. They cannot see outside. A keyhole is a window in a door.
- Outside (real) life is never quite what is appears from the lofty heavenly window. Down on the streets. Similar to marriage.
- They ignore the outside and each other.
- Divided. Separation. Isolation; but not alone. Self focus. Confined; in the room and in an unhappy marriage.
- Secret truth. Lies. Keeping up appearances. Façade. Stage. Could this be going on in every household?
