Tunnel Vision

        Had I not known for certain that I was still alive, I would have believed wholeheartedly that I was, in fact, a ghost. The face before me (after me, not me, please) seemed washed out, emptied of what had been a full and varied life – if a little haphazard and peculiar.
        Why?
        It wasn’t my face looking back at me at the other end of the weed-strewn tunnel under the Boulevard. 
        A dark sludge remained on the cobblestones from the most recent, flooding rain. Neither of us had as yet stepped into it.
        I must be dreaming.
        I cringed at the literary gaffe and wondered if I stared at my ghastly doppelganger long enough, the other might morph into something like a formless image in a kaleidoscope, changing, changing. Something that I could step over on my way somewhere else.
        Oh, dear God! Could it be that she’d never left? Could I warn her somehow that she must go? She really, must go.
        She inclined her head slightly as if she had heard something behind her. Then, she moved to her right to make way for a borough utility truck just rounding the corner behind her. I moved to my left as the truck entered the tunnel…and disappeared.
        There is no straight line between us. There are worlds, dimensions, constellations. I see that you have learned one thing, though: never square off against a perceived enemy. 
        I thought of curtains and how the absence of them in front of my windows – even with the window shades down – made me feel exposed. I needed something even as insubstantial as a curtain between me and her. 
        The woman raised her hand. I took a deep breath, held it, let it out slowly, relaxed my shoulders to take the burden. If there were a lesson here, I must learn it.
        I raised my hand to calm her. I could see that she could not recall having met me before on the stairs of the asylum where she had given her first piano recital. I had sat down just behind her and she seemed to relax in that strange and threatening place. 
        I wonder if she knows that the Village will change in ways that can never be remedied. 
        I wonder if she knows that the hour that she’d spent at the asylum would mark her in ways that will haunt her for the rest of her days. 
        I wonder if she knows that most of the people in the room that day had never heard Fur Elise played quite that fast or that all but one or two of them would neither have known nor cared.
        A shadow of whimsy seemed to mask her and she regarded me intently. I closed my eyes and imagined her fingers playing lightly over my face as if she were blind and I was the object of intense but benign curiosity. And in her fingers, such tenderness and grace. Perhaps she had been the one who should have taken piano lessons. I laughed aloud at the thought and opened my eyes. 
        I smiled back at her and knew that she was just visiting after all. Exploring those places that were still there and that meant something to her. Nothing particularly important, but something. She will find that what is beyond the tunnel has changed, but it should not matter. She will leave soon enough with a mind full of more pleasant memories than the ones that await her.
        I raised my hand to her. It was my turn. Suddenly, there was no point in my pressing on. I would go back and away and come back some day. 
        I nodded. She did not respond. I turned and went back the way I had come. And I hoped that whatever my future held, I might avoid whatever had gutted her.