Invisible Women

Trading Women 4

The woman down the hall is particularly susceptible to love falling. This is a term we’ve created particularly for her. Her problem, you see, has less to do with the frequency with which she falls in love, which is often, but rather, her problem is her ability to maintain living — here we mean day to day activities, not physical health, although we’ll get to that soon enough — once she is, in fact, in love. What is worse perhaps than her deteriorating hygiene and tendency to forget clothing when she’s in love is what happens when that love begins to dissolve. We do not mean a break up or a divorce. No, the woman down the hall hasn’t the nerves for that much concentrated emotion. Generally, the objects of her affection are inanimate, although sometimes they move. Sometimes, they’re even human, but she is one of those beautiful souls who can love anything, and thus, you see, her downfall.

The woman down the hall, you see, once she sees a pretty flower, one full of bloom and bees, loves it and loves it deeply, but there isn’t a flower in existence that can live forever, and the moment it begins to change, the woman down the hall cannot stand it. There is an intensity about her that frightens us, even as we speak this. In those moments when love begins to wane, the woman down the hall dies and she dies suddenly, passionately, with fervor.

It is true that we have witnessed her death more than two hundred million times, and we must admit that we never tire of it. The spectacle of the crash cart and CPR, the sirens and fireworks of light, the immediacy, it never wears thin. Of course, there are those times when the woman down the hall doesn’t make it, that they cannot revive her no matter how hard they try, and in those moments, we die a little bit too, but we survive if only because we know that tomorrow, she will be back, right where she was the day before and the day before and the day before, falling in love and dying over and over again.