Invisible Women

Continuous Women 3

The woman down the hall has hair longer than is even possible. Sometimes, we think she is Rapunzel, but we don’t believe in fairy tales so we ignore this possibility. We should note, however, that she lives at the apex of this building, that even though we say she lives down the hall, she really lives up the hall, high up, higher up that we can even see.

We’ve never seen her room, this woman down the hall. We’ve never even seen its door, although we’ve tried. Lord knows we’ve tried. Just the other day, in fact, we took the stairs up to her room — the elevator doesn’t go up that high — but we kept stepping and stepping until we’d stepped for days, and even then, there was no door. Our building isn’t so tall and yet we couldn’t reach it’s top. So we stepped for more days and days until one of us, we’re not sure who, passed out of exhaustion, but still, we forged upward. We hiked our way up until we literally couldn’t go one step further. Then, we rolled bodies into tight balls and bounced our way down. We simply could not have endured all those steps again.

And yet, when we see this woman down the hall who we like to call Rapunzel we do not ask her how she gets into her tower. Instead, we prefer to watch her knit her hair in the lounge. We try to not to disturb her, lest she lose count of her stitches and must begin anew.