The Courtyard

The Courtyard
February 1988
17 years old

I looked out my window and I saw them again, walking arm in arm through my courtyard. As watched, I tried to imagine what they were saying to one another. I listened to their conversations in my own mind and sympathized when they were serious, laughed when they were joking, and cried when they were upset.

I claim the courtyard as my own because it seems as if I’ve been looking into it from my window forever. I’ve spent every waking hour of every day looking out of this window from my wheelchair. I’ve come to know and recognize every crack and crevice on the surface of the courtyard’s concrete floor.

I situate myself at the window and watch its bend shed layer after layer of paint in large, unattractive patches. The bench resembles a piebald horse doomed to relieve the weary-footed pedestrians, and to pay homage to the drunks, bag ladies, hookers, and the homeless. They seek its sparse, yet comforting, refuge beneath the massive oak tree that blesses them with its shade in the summer, and protects them from the merciless winds in the winter.

That is where they met. They were sitting on that rickety, weathered bench on fine, perfect spring evening. It is the place where he proposed to her, kneeling on one knee and looking up into her face with an expression of hopeful uncertainty, she looking into his with perfect love and ecstatic joy, quietly nodding, “Yes.” It is where they sat and planned their future together. It is where they cried and comforted each other. Where they kissed for the first time. Where they came to reminisce.

On this time, as I looked out I realized this wasn’t the same couple. She was walking into the courtyard on the arm of another, defiling the sacred beauty it had once held not only for her and her husband, but for me, as well.

At first, I thought it must be her father. She was proudly showing him the sanctuary where she’d met her husband, proving once and for all that some good does come from talking to strangers. But after studying him more intently, I saw that he was too young to be this woman’s father. I watch in horror as they sat together on that withering bench and kissed each other with such passion and fervour that I was ashamed and embarrassed to watch, yet too mortified to avert my eyes.

I was a witness to this blasphemous act for days and weeks on end, lamely wondering what had happened to the first young man, blindly hoping he never entered the courtyard in search for his bride.

Then one day it happened. He burst into the courtyard looking haggard and miserable. It was a hot, uncomfortable day and my window open. I heard the ugly words they shouted to one another. It was the first and last time I’d heard their voices.

Then I saw him draw the gun from the waistband of his trousers, concealed beneath his wrinkled, unwashed shirt. I watched as the tears rolled down his scruffy cheek to fall and stain the filthy material.

He lifted the gun and aimed it at the lover’s head. The lover’s eyes widened and stared in disbelief as he babbled meaningless words of apology. The husband pulled the trigger. The bullet made a neat hole between the lover’s eyes and blew apart the back of his skull. The lover fell in a heap at the woman’s feet. She screamed and her husband cut her off mid-note as he shot her, too.

When she fell, he simply stood there, staring at the woman he loved and who had cuckolded him, sending him into a frenzy of unbearable grief.

As the sirens approached, he looked up at me, sorrow shadowing his features. He stared into my eyes and uttered a single word: “Why?” as he fell to his knees. I watch helplessly as he held the end of the barrel between his lips and pulled the trigger one last time.

The drunks, bag ladies, hookers and the homeless still take refuge on that bench beneath the oak tree. But the weary-footed pedestrians have nearly disappeared. The few who remain step blindly over the bloodstains on the pavement and the bits of gore that refuse to be washed away by the rain and wind. Only once did I witness a relationship begin to unfold there again, but it ended abruptly when she slapped him loud and hard across his face and stalked off into the darkness. He simply sighed and went his own way.

I fear my once-sacred courtyard has become a damned plot of land, destined to doom any relations it might inspire between young lovers by the ghosts left behind by my ill-fated friends.

I continue my life as before, only saddened that my courtyard has become a shrine in memory of what was beautiful and shining and alive become ugly and tarnished and dead.

I dread going to that window and looking into the bleak space below. But I do, because one day, something bright and beautiful will be reborn there to make my courtyard what it once was.