Her Reality

The depressed infertile woman walking around with an empty stroller.

The alcoholic with tears in his eyes, toasting with his friend who died the year before.

The pathological narcissist who hates his life but yet stops in front of every storefront to admire his reflection, which he finds both disgusting and so pleasing to his eyes.

All these cases, often judged different, have one thing in common: they do not meet the standard of today"s societies.

Let us now take the case of a young woman who is different in many ways.

Possessing her own world, the young woman lives her own reality without suffering from it.

Seeing the world around her differently from the rest of her loved ones, as if she were trapped inside a soap bubble, the young woman sometimes has this strange feeling of flying lightly over a world that is not her own.

Weird, crazy, mentally deficient, ..., the adjectives that were used to describe her are not lacking.

Often hovering in an alternate reality, rarely reached by words from the so-called real world, the young woman grew up quietly without worrying about what was emanating from below.

Paradoxically, when she smiled at the birds that spoke to her, her father cursed his gene pool while her mother burst into tears.

In spite of the sadness of her progenitors, like the round cubes that despite her stubbornness, she was unable to get into the square hole of her toy when she was a child, her universe cannot be superimposed on that of the common human being.

At the age of one, unlike common children, the young woman did not try to discover what was around her. Whether her parents were present or absent had no influence on her joy of life. Always smiling, already able to take short walks alone, her hands pointing at the ceiling, she tried to reach what only she could discern.

At the age of two, the young woman was still in the same mood. No anger, no tears, no questions, no attention paid to the one who had carried her for nine long months, from her parents" point of view the little girl had only one obsession: to reach the unreachable in this invisible world from which she could not take her eyes off.

Asperger"s Syndrome, attention deficit disorder of some kind, whatever, according to the child psychiatrist who examined her at that time, the little girl was too young to make a definitive diagnosis of her mental state: it had to wait until her brain developed...

... and in sixteen years the young woman"s brain had plenty of time to develop.

"Jenny? Jenny, are you with me? Jenny, what are you listening to so attentively?"

If James Kovach, a school psychologist at Clems High School in the inner suburbs of New York City, had many opportunities to be bored during his career, in the last three years a most enjoyable entertainment has come to embellish his dreary life. Indeed, since the beginning of a school year blessed by the G.o.d Wundt, he has been meeting the young brown woman who is now facing him almost daily.

Becoming a psychologist in a second-rate school was not in James" initial plans.

After graduating brilliantly in England, he aspired to something more, bigger, more glorious, such as opening his own practice in a modern building on Wall Street.

He could proudly see himself getting out of a German black luxury sedan, dressed in an elegant custom-made Italian suit. The wealthiest clients, gourmet restaurants, art openings in the trendiest art galleries in NY, invitations to go to the theater sent by the directors themselves. In other words, James was dreaming of life with a capital L.

It"s a shame that sometimes fate is capricious, and in this case, in James" case, this cruel companion decided that the professional life of the young man of the time would not be as he had dreamed it would be.

James"s dream of glory was shattered when a ridiculous mishap suddenly occurred. Due to a tiny strategic error, a shot too fast, his desire for greatness fell as suddenly as it had taken shape in his young graduate mind.

The mistake in question is called Martha. To be more precise, as a result of this shot too fast, the incident sprang up in Martha"s belly and forced the unfortunate James to look for a job there where he could be found as quickly as possible.

Martha fecundated, the error has germinated then blossomed and finally left the family garden eighteen years later, making James a small school psychologist in a very mediocre High School.

Time is often cruel to those who have not taken the path they desire. James, too old, unmotivated and used to the High School ringtone that every hour reminds him of how pathetic his life is, stayed at the school where the unbearable smell of acne lotion floats daily.

Twenty-two years of listening to sporty boys with a hoa.r.s.e voice brag about their biceps and then looking sadly at his thin, white arms sticking out of his Hawaiian shirt.

Over two decades of putting up with these girls talking about their waxing and to drive the same Nissan he had bought second-hand for $500.

So much time to tolerate the absurdities of ignorant professors from the worst universities, but whose main defect remains to be convinced democrats.

All those years of suffering... All this time lost within these initially white but now gray walls where the most summaries knowledge is dispensed.

Without that rea.s.suring bell which however reminds him that time is inexorably pa.s.sing and takes him further slowly from his dreams, it"s likely that James would have been packing his bags long ago.

"The trumpets sound again."