12.20.05
Weirdest Home Videos
The view through her window was the best in her house.
The camera was set up on a tripod, three greens straight legs digging into my carpet for such a long time that now the tack and fallen in under itself and if I moved it the little indentations would stay. My father though I had some kind of artistic bent, he hoped that I would grow out of it, that eventually I would �grow up and be a man.� He still paid for my tapes, for the darkroom I set up in the back yard, for the headphones that I used to listen to her breathing as I slept.
She ate three square meals a day with her family and would talk on the phone wile doing her homework. She won prizes in track and stuck them on her wall next to pictures that she tore from magazines of clothes that she liked. She spent hours sketching the dresses, pulling out swathes of fabric and draping them around her.
I watched her teach herself how to sew. I have all of it on tape, from the very first minute. It took her a month to figure it all out and then she bought an electric sewing machine and cut her finger. Her blood is a very deep maroon red. Her mother must cook foods with too much iron in them.
The cameras need to be cleaned every week. I keep them in a drawer with covers for each part so that the dust doesn�t get in. I wipe my hands before touching them, I bathe before watching her and I let the air dry my skin as I do. It feels like she�s near then, like her breath is touching me. I�ve never met her. We go to school together.
It started when I noticed her ears one day. She was in front of me, picking up her bike and she pushed back her hair with one hand and I could see the blue veins under her skin, shining against the paleness of her flesh. I�d never noticed her before. I started taping that night when I knew who she was, that id been living next to her all these years and never really seen her.
Her father would come into her room and stared at the pictures of her and her friends, his brow sweating. She would come home and he would run out again, pretending he had just come from the bathroom. Once, even while she was bathing he flipped though her phone book, looking for �I don�t know- some token in between the pages. Her shoulders as she came out of the shower were pink from the heat and glistening with water. Her hair hung over her face in a red tangle and as she closed her blinds, I imagined for a while that she was looking at me.
Of course she wasn�t then, but I think she saw me eventually. She moved her desk so that she could see out of her window and then I could see her get ready in the morning, squinting as she lined her lips in the mirror.
I sent her a note one day telling her I was watching her and I saw her look around as she read it, more curious than surprised. She began to do little dances in front of her mirror, pretending to know ballet and sometimes falling to the floor in her spins. I would send her more notes, �Great job last night,� �do you know what you look like when you�re sleeping?� She pasted them on her wall with her ribbons and trophies and began writing her own. She taped them to the window, refusing to open the blinds for long period of time. I wrote begging her to open them.
She wanted to meet.
I said ok.
We were supposed to meet in a coffee shop down the street, but I only watched her as she waited for me, waited for this man wearing a blue sports t-shirt and sneakers. She left two hours later, after two cappuccinos and a small brownie. Her cheeks were flushed.
That night I got a letter. I watched you, she said.
shi-ou-sama at
