The Accidental Voyeur

The lucid windows were washed today with cream, when no one was around. The cream was soft and moist, thick and white. The windows loved it, their panes being slid against lovingly, slowly, with finesse. “I enjoy having my back stroked,” the lucid windows said, and lifted up their curtains over their heads and turned their backs to be washed on the other sides. “Just use your own style and panache.” A little disconcerting.

As they were so intimately being stroked curtainless, a man in a yellow suit wandered by, smoking a cigar outside the most expensive restaurant in Europe. He didn't want to disturb the guests inside with the smoke, but had purchased an expensive cigar for dessert, so was wandering in the fresh air while his friends finished their colorful meal. He noticed the windows with their “shirts” raised, was concerned someone might break in, and stuck his head inside lucidity, admiring the little lights inside, as it was an antique model. As he looked beyond the nobs and dials and wheels, he gasped, realizing what reality really was. He was astonished by the clarity it was possible to see it with and still live. He understood. It was like nothing he had even begun to imagine.

He didn't realize the windows were in the midst of their stroking, had thought he was alone, until he heard the lucid windows begin moaning and the cream frothing, and he turned to face them and his mouth fell open, his eyes enlarged, just at the same time that the windows realized he had his head stuck inside when they thought they were alone at such a tender moment. All parties shuddered, turned pinker, and the man in yellow turned away suddenly, with a mumbled apology, but with a memory he imagined he would return to often, a memory that would come back in new scenarios in his dreams, that would make him reconsider the commitment to his personality, and pull back the petals of flowers and peer inside their trembling panties. He had seen.

On the other side of the lucid windows were scenes that were specific to the man in yellow. He had seen something no one else would ever see just in that way, but the themes were universal. The truth was undeniable. He had wanted to lick lucidity, curl his tongue and take it back inside his mouth, curl it all the way down his throat, let it bulge inside his neck, feel it snake into his stomach, and come out into the netherworlds with warmth and satisfaction. He burped instead, the emptiness of lucidity he was suddenly aware of in his innards making air that longed, air that seeped its juices in futile anticipation.

His eyes burned and watered after having glimpsed visions of lucidity, and felt they wanted to be washed with cream too, lovingly. Tears were forming at the edges of them, poignantly hovering on the edge without ever dripping down, suspended in that state of welling, welling, welling. He put his head in his hands and made a long, gruff moan. His cigar burned his forehead, as he had forgotten he had it in his hands. He threw it down, expensive as it was, onto the parking lot of the most expensive restaurant in Europe. He shook his head within his hands.

He didn't want to go back to join his friends for their colorful meal. But he did. And they said “I enjoy having the neck of my bottle of wine wrapped in a napkin. Just use your own finesse.” The waiter precisely put the napkin on the neck of the expensive wine, without letting his fingers linger lovingly feel the glass, and they watched the extremely long hairs of his black, arched eyebrows that so vigorously flourished on his debonair face which was made to look down at people at their tables, without turning his head downward to face them. The man in yellow took the napkin off the neck of the wine bottle so he could pour it. He needed a drink to settle him, and loosen his tongue so he could once again fit into the conversations of illusion and mundanity.

The waiter saw the napkin was off the bottle's neck and came over and put it back on even more precisely, his head held even higher, and it seemed his eyebrows were crawling higher as well, one cocked, as if to suggest the man in yellow was the most uncivilized thing he had seen that day. “Would you like dessert,” the waiter asked, as if, of course, the man in yellow was too uncouth to have the correct answer. He said “I'm not very hungry any more. I'd just like some melon, please.”

“Hmmf. Of course, yes, Sir, very good.” When the waiter brought the melon, the man in yellow began eating it with a spoon. The waiter leaped across the room and said, “Sir! Melons are eaten with a knife and fork!”

At that point, the man in the yellow suit curled his lips so far backwards they entered his throat and pulled in the whole scene of the restaurant with them, tasting it all with their delicate nerve endings. He swallowed it all, without the use of a spoon, knife, or fork. He burped from the emptiness of it all, the longing to eat something more substantial, such as the visions of lucidity he had spied in their moment of nakedness and enjoyment. But it was the lucidity that made everything else he saw never enough because he saw that for humanity, nothing was ever enough, and he wanted meaning that went beyond meaning.

He let the scene in the restaurant engorge his innards, as he looked outside through the hole he had created by eating the restaurant, and all his friends, and the waiter, and the neighboring diners, their conversations. He peeked his head through the hole, boldly. With no apologies this time. No more sense of embarrassment for him!

And this time, his eyes watered and the tears welled, but with such joy, such panache, such satisfaction, he smiled bigger than he had ever smiled, with his lips that had been sucked inside his body. He had a big belly laugh. And he decided it was time for another walk.