Hallucination

I have cried four times in Europe. Twice over what I had lost, once over what I have found, and once today. The marble was real, it was smooth and cool like all the other marble I have felt in Rome. It felt like the porcelain I sit on now, but sun kissed, something this bathtub has never been. It ran the length of the banister and down below my feet before breaking into the worn teeth that form the stairs of a stair to nowhere in particular, stairs the world calls the Spanish Steps. Before they came, I was looking at nothing and into no one, writing some, but to be honest not much, and there they were, surrounded. My worst nightmare brought to life; twenty girls in sashes, bathing suits, and high heels, walking sex advertisements in the guise of pageant contestants. They were smiling at the catcalls, posing for pictures, acting as if the tight black suits they were wearing covered their butts, legs, and breasts. Modella Oggi y18 Palazzo Ben Essere. Teenagers with painted faces and fake smiles climbed the steps with hip movements I have only done in jest to the platform below me where they broke off into groups, one lit-up, another continued to pose, and the other put pants on without removing their heels. One alone broke from the group. She slumped her thin frame down against a wall and tried to hide her expression in her long hair parted down the middle, but it was not lost on me, it traveled to my face and down my throat where it formed a knot. I had seen her before. They would call her a high-fashion model, skinny, but not sexy, and she would care so much, too much. A man walked over and asked the group to take off their pants. They smiled and obliged. The lump that had been building in my throat dropped to my stomach, instantly dismissing the hunger that had occupied it. I never wished to eat again. They formed a line of pouty lips before a man no less than forty who held a clipboard. At the sound of their names, they stepped forward to allow his eyes to travel more easily up and down their bodies, and answered his questions in numbers. And then a man was standing next to me. Was I from England? Was I a journalist? His eyes were traveling like the man’s below, and I felt just as naked. I shook my head as the knot exploded, I was running down the steps as the girls started walking, one by one, back and forth along the platform to the delight of the men gathered on the stairs and the scrutiny of the man with the clipboard and his photographer. Now I sit, head in hands on the rim of a bathtub not my own watching the teardrop on my knee dry. I thought it had been disgust at the lustfulness of it all, I thought it had been anger over the fact that it has happened to me too many times, but it was the look on that girl’s face that made me see that she cannot. She can’t nor can the other girls nor can the gawking men, their elevator eyes and their stupid questions and their whistles gave their ignorance away. Can’t they see beyond this temple of flesh? Do they not know that they were made to be so much more? That’s why the knot became a lump that exploded into tears; I am once again reminded of the saddest truth.