Post by alwayscole on Oct 9, 2006 1:32:22 GMT -5
Read at your own risk. May not be suitable for people under 18 years of age. Be Warned!
What on Earth
Melissa considered herself a normal college student. She was a sophomore economics major at a large university and she posted a fairly good grade point average. However, her parents were very strict and demanded increasingly better grades, which forced her to study all the time. In addition, she wasn’t exactly “Miss Popular” and these two factors severely limited her social life and circle of friends. Melissa was moderately pretty, but she couldn’t keep a boyfriend for more than a couple months and her sex life was as non-existent as life on the Sun. Through all this, she still considered herself “normal” because she wasn’t an all-out “freak.” It was a small point, but it often kept her out of depression. She wasn’t happy with her life, but she wasn’t depressed over it. It was a fine line she walked, but she was still on it.
She continued to walk that line on this particular Thursday night. She was in her room, studying for a test on Friday, while her few friends started the weekend early and partied at a sorority house. Melissa sat at her desk with her little lamp illuminating the many books spread before her. It was the only light on in the room and it called all attention to those pesky books. She had no music on and her computer was off, so in theory she had nothing to distract her from the task at hand. However, Melissa couldn’t concentrate for the life of her. She knew she needed to do well on this test, but her mind kept wandering to what she could be doing had she gone out with her friends. When this happened, she usually motivated herself by scaring herself with the realization that bad grades would irritate her parents and probably force them to stop funding her college education. It was a very real threat and it usually was enough to focus her thoughts, but not this night. Melissa just stared aimlessly at the words and pictures on the illuminated pages before her. Normally, these words formed interesting economic theories and examples. This night, though, they were nothing more than randomly strung together characters from a random alphabet.
Finally, she stood up and walked around her room in an attempt to clear her head. Melissa lived in a single, which allowed her to do all sorts of strange things, like pacing the room, without anyone watching her. It also gave her a lot of time alone, which enabled her not only to study peacefully, but also have a place to get away from the world. She paced the length of the room five times before stopping in front of the large plate-glass window that took up half the far wall of her room. As she stood there, Melissa looked across the way at the large dormitory that faced her. It was about fifteen stories high and there were ten rooms on every floor that faced her. With it being dark, many of the rooms had their lights on and curtains open, giving Melissa a view into them. From her perch on the sixth floor of her own building, she had a decent view of thirty or so rooms, twenty of which had their lights on and/or curtains open.
Melissa temporarily forgot about her studying as she peeked at these random people’s lives. From what she could see, the rooms were split evenly between male and female, and all of them were doubles. She didn’t know any of the people she saw in the windows, but she thought she recognized one or two of them as faces she passed during her day. Melissa watched intently as these anonymous people lived out their Thursday night before her eyes. Some of them watched television, while others sat around drinking and a third group played a game. Not all the rooms were filled with groups of people, though, as some had solitary students or pairs of them working on their computers or reading books and magazines. These people were all doing things that Melissa wanted to do, but didn’t allow herself. She was almost jealous of these anonymous figures in the windows. Watching these people from her hidden place in the shadows made Melissa’s body tingle. Although none of them were doing anything sexual, Melissa still felt like she was on one of those porn web-sites, watching a voyeur cam. It was exciting to watch these people without them knowing she was. She felt naughty.
Melissa ran to her closet, where she dug through her piles of camping equipment. After a few minutes, she found her binoculars that she used when she went hiking.
“Success!” she said aloud, as she ran back to her spot at the window. She put the binoculars to her eyes and with a little focusing the people looked so close that it felt as if she was in their room. Now, she saw almost every detail. She was able to read the title of the book one guy was reading, the type of beer one girl was chugging and the name on the pizza box that sat idly in one room. These intimate details sucked Melissa in and she slowly forgot about her studying. She became oblivious to the minutes, then hours, that ticked by as she moved her gaze from one window to another, like changing the television channel. Nothing all that exciting happened to these people as she stood for hours in her room, oblivious to the aches in her legs. Nevertheless, she couldn’t pull herself away while there were people awake. Eventually, the people gathered in the rooms dissipated and the tenants began to go to bed. Melissa watched until the last guy tucked himself in and turned off his light. Only then did she peel the binoculars away from her eyes and place them on the windowsill. Part of her wanted to continue watching the people during their most vulnerable moments, but something in the back of her mind crept to the forefront and told her to stop. She stood at the window a moment longer, as if she would resist this command, but then she turned away and looked at her desk. There, sitting exactly where she had left them, were her economics books, still illuminated by the yellow glow of the desk lamp. Reality set in again and a grimace swept across Melissa’s face. Before she moved to the desk, Melissa’s eyes caught sight of the red digital numbers on her alarm clock. Melissa turned away from the books and went about preparing for bed. After going to the bathroom to brush her teeth and relieve herself, she came back, turned off the light and crawled into bed. As she lay in bed, trying desperately to fall asleep, Melissa’s mind kept returning to the people in the windows. Scenes from the rooms kept flashing in her head and she thought about how wonderful those people’s lives seemed from behind her binocular lenses. She was jealous of the fun they seemed to have that night and the images continued to burn into her mind until well after she fell into a deep, unsettling sleep. The next morning couldn’t have been worse for Melissa. She woke up a half-hour late and had to skip her shower so she would arrive at her class on time. Once there, she promptly failed her test in record time, then decided to skip her only other class so she could return to her room and sulk. When she arrived at her abode, Melissa threw her backpack to the ground and tried to forget about the work she should do so that she could have fun for the rest of the weekend. Instead, she walked to her stereo and perused her CD collection. Most of her musical interest lay within the “classic rock” genre and her collection proved that with albums from such bands as Led Zeppelin, The Who, Queen, The Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd. Her eyes finally settled on Pink Floyd’s The Wall. The Wall was one of her favorites, so much so that she owned the studio version, a live version, a live bootleg and even the movie. The album’s themes of solitude and confinement struck a chord deep within and she felt as if every lyric held some personal meaning. It was the perfect album for her mood. Melissa popped the two CDs into her five CD changer and crawled onto her bed, where she laid back and closed her eyes. The first notes struck loud and clear, and Melissa let the music seep into the depths of her body.
Melissa slowly drifted in and out of the waking world as the story of the troubled singer “Pink” unfolded through the music. As she did, images of her previous night’s voyeurism replayed in her mind for the third, sometimes fourth, or fifth time. The lyrics of the ghostly music acted as a soundtrack to mental slideshow, although she was only able to coherently make out bits of them.
After a couple hours, the album ended and Melissa pulled herself out of her dreamlike state, back into reality. The combinations of sights and sounds made Melissa feel alive and filled her with excitement, but it also made her yearn for more. She walked to the place she stood the night before and looked across at the thirty channels of live entertainment. Unfortunately, it was the middle of the afternoon and the sunlight reflecting off the windows made it impossible for her to peer into them. Melissa looked down at her watch and saw that it was only three. Although it was late January and darkness fell across the land relatively early, she still had two good hours before she could resume her invasion of privacy. A dejected look momentarily stole across her young face, but a small smile appeared when she decided that she would fill this void by watching the movie version of The Wall.
She popped the tape into the VCR, resumed her position on the bed and not only listened to, but watched “Pink’s” tragic story unfold. She became so enthralled with the movie that reality totally left her. Even the images of, and her thirst for, the people in the windows were temporarily forgotten as she watched the disturbing mix of actors and animation fill her television screen. She couldn’t pull her eyes away from the psychotic animations of the marching hammers, the horrible schoolteacher, the judge, the entwined plants or the ever-present wall. These ghostly images dug deep into her just as the images of the people in the windows had the night before. When the movie ended, Melissa felt as if something inside her had changes. She knew she was no longer the same Melissa that had existed for the previous nineteen years. The combination of the events in the past twenty-four hours had changed her ever so slightly and although she didn’t know if it was for the better or the worse, she knew it felt good.
As she let this feeling reverberate throughout her body, Melissa noticed that it had become dark and there were lights on in the rooms. She wanted to drop everything and run to the window, but she was extremely hungry and nature was calling. She ran to the bathroom, then to the dining hall where she ate a quick dinner. A half-hour later, she returned to her room with her animal urges satisfactorily quenched. Upon returning to her room, Melissa went straight for her window and looked at the dorm. Before she got too involved, though, she grabbed her chair from the desk and pulled it up to the window. She would not repeat her mistake from the previous night. Her legs still hurt from standing so long.
After finding a comfortable position in the chair, she grabbed her binoculars, brought them into focus and browsed her selection of windows. She finally stopped at a room she had paid a good amount of attention to the night before.
Melissa moved her gaze from one window to another until she had checked all thirty in her view. As evening turned to night, she continued watching the rooms’ tenants come and go, some preparing for a night in, others readying themselves for a night on the town. While she watched these people live out their Friday nights, she found herself labeling the rooms, making it easier for her to refer to them in her mind. The guys in the lower left-hand corner became room “A1” and the girls in the upper right corner became “F5.” The longer she watched, the more Melissa felt that she was part of their community. As the minutes ticked by in their unstoppable march, Melissa continued to spy on the people across from her. She was so transfixed on them, that she barely heard the shrill ringing of her phone around nine o’clock. The first ring seemed very distant, as if it was coming from one of the rooms she was watching. The second ring was decidedly closer and the third ring managed to break through her haze and jolt her back into reality.
Melissa put down her binoculars and stared at the vile communications device that sat on her desk and had rudely pulled her out of her pleasant state. She knew the phone would ring once more before the voicemail activated, but she had no intention of answering it before the messaging started. She didn’t care who was on the other end. Whoever it was, wasn’t important enough to take time out of her peaceful night to talk to. Thus, Melissa just stared at the phone as it rang for the fourth time, then left her in silence. She brought the binoculars back to her eyes and was about to resume her “observations”, when she noticed that she didn’t like the silence. It was fine before, but now she thought it was distracting and eerie. Melissa placed the binoculars down again and walked to her stereo, which still had The Wall in it. She put the CD player on “repeat”, pressed “play” and returned to her chair. As she returned the binoculars to their rightful place before her eyes, the opening chords shattered the deadly silence and soothed her body.
Ah yes. This is so much better, she thought as she focused on one of the rooms. Before long, time lost its meaning again and she immersed herself into the lives of the people she watched. At first, the music overlaid the scenes in her binoculars, but soon the two twisted together, becoming one, just as they did during her dreams that afternoon. This symbiosis brought Melissa’s mind and body to a seemingly utopian plane. These two things dominated her and made her forget about reality. Reality was painful and cruel. However, the world through her binoculars was fun, exciting and a place where she would always be accepted and never accosted by anyone, because no one knew of her existence. She could live with these people, enjoy their lives, assimilate their feelings, all without worrying if she was smart enough, pretty enough or cool enough. Melissa had found her Nirvana.
Melissa watched for two more hours as the sixty or so people in the rooms continued their normal routines. To them, the past couple of nights might not have been exciting, but for Melissa their lives were hundreds of times better than hers. From where she sat, watching television or playing cards on the Internet became as exciting as sky diving. Every event was amplified, intensified beyond belief. Melissa thought that things couldn’t become any better. However, when the eleven o’clock hour came, she found that she was completely wrong. It was at this time when she became a real voyeur.
She had been scanning the rooms, looking for anything out of the ordinary and when her eyes landed on the windows of “B2”, she found something. There, sitting on one of the beds, were a guy and a girl, feverishly fondling each other. Immediately, the other twenty-one active rooms lost importance and Melissa’s eyes locked onto the two bodies. She watched intently as their hands ran over each other’s bodies and slowly articles of clothing were removed. Finally, the two were naked and the guy plunged himself into the girl. Melissa’s whole body shook as if the guy had entered her instead, and her hands gripped the binoculars tighter.
As the guy continued to push himself into the girl, Melissa felt herself cease watching the girl and actually became the girl. Every thrust of the guy’s body rippled through Melissa’s. She felt him inside her, his hands running over her and his hot breath falling upon her. With every thrust, her body reacted in kind, sending waves of pleasure through her. Far away in her subconscious, she heard The Wall mixing with these actions. The aptly titled Young Lust resonated in her ears as moans escaped her lips.
Melissa’s mind screamed at the guy in “B2.” Just then, the guy’s orgasm tore through his body and Melissa him unleashing his seed inside her. Her body shook violently, but she held onto the binoculars all the while. She kept her eyes pinned on the guy as her body slowly settled. Melissa could no longer see the other girl. She had ceased to exist to Melissa a long time before. All that remained was Melissa and the guy. She watched as he got off the bed and walked to the window, where he grabbed the curtain. He started to close it, but he suddenly stopped and looked out across the empty space between him and Melissa. She thought that, for just a second, his eyes locked onto her. Abruptly, the guy closed the curtains and cut Melissa off from his world. She continued to watch the closed curtain while her breathing returned to normal and the sweat evaporated off her body. Finally, she realized there would be no more action in that room for the night, so she directed her gaze to other rooms. She watched for hours, and although nothing as exciting as what happened in room “B2” occurred, she couldn’t pull her eyes away from the open windows. Several times that utopian feeling rushed through her as she placed herself in the rooms she watched. She could feel the floor she sat on or the bed she laid on while in these rooms. She could feel the presence of people all around her and could even hear their conversations. Above, below, around and within all this was the ever present music of The Wall. The lyrics paralleled everything she watched and did, and they spoke to her in way they never had.
Melissa watched the rooms until every last person went to sleep, and then she watched a little more. Eventually, the sun rose and Melissa’s night of voyeurism ended. She placed the binoculars down and stood up. Immediately, her body reacted violently as her stiff muscles screamed and her bladder cried for relief. She half ran, half stumbled to the bathroom, then came back and collapsed on her bed, without realizing the music was still playing. As her mind raced toward deep sleep, a multitude of voices twisted and tumbled through her brain.
Thus went the rest of the weekend. During the day, Melissa slept, ate little food and studied, which she only managed to do for two hours over two days. At night, Melissa entered the lives of the sixty people across from her. She spent hours upon hours watching them, feeling as if she was one of them, as if it was her life. She let nothing distract her from her nightly pleasure. She left the phone and the door unanswered to ensure that she kept her focus. The music of The Wall continually played in the background through all these hours. She rotated through her different versions, but the lyrics were the same hour after hour, day after day. She played the music twenty-four hours a day, even when she wasn’t in the room. On those rare occasions that she did leave the room for food or the bathroom, the lyrics unconsciously ran through her head. This repetition would annoy most people, but it soothed Melissa. It reminded her that the more she slipped into her new world, the better she felt.
By the time the weekend was over, Melissa was buried in her new world. The week that followed didn’t help her situation, starting with Monday, when she slept through all her classes. She only made it to four classes the rest of the week, as she became more isolated. The days may have changed for her, but the nights were always the same. She spent more hours watching her “friends” sleep than she actually spent sleeping. The next weekend was a replica of the previous one and the next week continued the pattern.
During those two weeks, Melissa cared nothing for her real world. Books sat on her desk untouched and homework went undone. She went to a grand total of six classes in ten days and tried to avoid any contact with her friends and professors. Since they didn’t live in one of those thirty room, they were nothing but interlopers trying to deny Melissa her “life.” When she did happen to run into one of them on the street, Melissa spun a lie about how she was really sick and couldn’t get out much. She even fit the part for she had lost ten pounds in two weeks and had huge bags under her eyes.
When the third and fourth weeks rolled around, Melissa continued to skip class, “observe” all night, lose weight and avoid contact with other humans. Watching the rooms every night felt real enough to Melissa that she hardly knew the difference between her two lives. She would have conversations with these people as she “participated” in their activities. Melissa ate, drank, slept, watched television, worked on the computer, talked on the phone, masturbated and even had sex with these people. The life her mind, her view and her music had created was perfect.
During these two weeks, Melissa’s time spent outside of her room and her contact with other people were reduced even further. She now spent less than three hours a day outside her room and most of that time was spent on the toilet, occasionally the shower, or in the dining hall nibbling on what scraps of food she could bring herself to eat. She only went to class once and even then she left halfway through. At best, Melissa checked her voicemail and e-mail every other day and rarely responded to any messages. Almost everyone in her life wanted to talk to her, but Melissa wanted no contact with them. They were part of her old, boring life. That was the life she was trying to leave behind.
On Monday of the fifth week, Melissa managed to drag herself out of her room and to one of her classes. That voice of reason deep in her head, the one she tried so hard to repress, had blasted its way to the forefront and convinced her to go to class. The voice was making its last attempt to keep Melissa based in reality. When she arrived at class, Melissa felt like everyone was watching her and they had good reason to stare. She had lost twenty-five pounds in four weeks and her entire body looked beaten from her living her “life” across the way up to sixteen hours a day. She looked as if she could be the poster child for anorexia or some famine ravaged country.
Throughout the class, Melissa tried desperately to concentrate on the professor. She remembered when economics had meant something to her, but now her mind found better things to clamp onto.
After two agonizing hours, her class ended and she stood to leave. Before she could reach the safety of the door, though, her teacher intercepted her.
“Melissa, can I have a word with you?”
“Uh, sure.”
They sat at the front table, Melissa on one side and her professor on the other. As she suspected, he started by explaining how he was concerned about her because she hadn’t been to class lately. He droned on about how unhealthy she looked and how he wanted to make sure everything was okay. Then he asked her a question which she hadn’t seen coming.
“Melissa, are you on drugs?”
She hesitated for a moment, then sternly replied, “No.”
“Good, because I would hate to have that happened to a nice girl like you. Now, back to this class. You really need to start coming if you want to do well. Blah, blah, blah, blah…” Melissa looked at her professor and saw him for what he really was. In her eyes, he mutated, becoming this horribly disfigured person. He was shaking a stick at her, threatening her. “You will only come to my class! You will forget these other people! They mean nothing! Economics is king!” “NO!” Melissa shouted as she leapt from her chair. The professor looked completely confused, but to Melissa, he was still mocking her. “Get away from me you bastard! I knew you wanted to take everything away from me!”
She bolted from the table and burst through the door, leaving the professor bewildered. She didn’t stop running until she reached the door of her room. She unlocked and opened the door, letting herself back into her sanctuary. As she did, she felt the door push against something and send whatever it was sliding across the carpet to the center of the room. She closed the door, put down her backpack and looked to see what the object was that she moved. She peered at the carpet and saw that it was a lone, red brick.
What on Earth
Melissa considered herself a normal college student. She was a sophomore economics major at a large university and she posted a fairly good grade point average. However, her parents were very strict and demanded increasingly better grades, which forced her to study all the time. In addition, she wasn’t exactly “Miss Popular” and these two factors severely limited her social life and circle of friends. Melissa was moderately pretty, but she couldn’t keep a boyfriend for more than a couple months and her sex life was as non-existent as life on the Sun. Through all this, she still considered herself “normal” because she wasn’t an all-out “freak.” It was a small point, but it often kept her out of depression. She wasn’t happy with her life, but she wasn’t depressed over it. It was a fine line she walked, but she was still on it.
She continued to walk that line on this particular Thursday night. She was in her room, studying for a test on Friday, while her few friends started the weekend early and partied at a sorority house. Melissa sat at her desk with her little lamp illuminating the many books spread before her. It was the only light on in the room and it called all attention to those pesky books. She had no music on and her computer was off, so in theory she had nothing to distract her from the task at hand. However, Melissa couldn’t concentrate for the life of her. She knew she needed to do well on this test, but her mind kept wandering to what she could be doing had she gone out with her friends. When this happened, she usually motivated herself by scaring herself with the realization that bad grades would irritate her parents and probably force them to stop funding her college education. It was a very real threat and it usually was enough to focus her thoughts, but not this night. Melissa just stared aimlessly at the words and pictures on the illuminated pages before her. Normally, these words formed interesting economic theories and examples. This night, though, they were nothing more than randomly strung together characters from a random alphabet.
Finally, she stood up and walked around her room in an attempt to clear her head. Melissa lived in a single, which allowed her to do all sorts of strange things, like pacing the room, without anyone watching her. It also gave her a lot of time alone, which enabled her not only to study peacefully, but also have a place to get away from the world. She paced the length of the room five times before stopping in front of the large plate-glass window that took up half the far wall of her room. As she stood there, Melissa looked across the way at the large dormitory that faced her. It was about fifteen stories high and there were ten rooms on every floor that faced her. With it being dark, many of the rooms had their lights on and curtains open, giving Melissa a view into them. From her perch on the sixth floor of her own building, she had a decent view of thirty or so rooms, twenty of which had their lights on and/or curtains open.
Melissa temporarily forgot about her studying as she peeked at these random people’s lives. From what she could see, the rooms were split evenly between male and female, and all of them were doubles. She didn’t know any of the people she saw in the windows, but she thought she recognized one or two of them as faces she passed during her day. Melissa watched intently as these anonymous people lived out their Thursday night before her eyes. Some of them watched television, while others sat around drinking and a third group played a game. Not all the rooms were filled with groups of people, though, as some had solitary students or pairs of them working on their computers or reading books and magazines. These people were all doing things that Melissa wanted to do, but didn’t allow herself. She was almost jealous of these anonymous figures in the windows. Watching these people from her hidden place in the shadows made Melissa’s body tingle. Although none of them were doing anything sexual, Melissa still felt like she was on one of those porn web-sites, watching a voyeur cam. It was exciting to watch these people without them knowing she was. She felt naughty.
Melissa ran to her closet, where she dug through her piles of camping equipment. After a few minutes, she found her binoculars that she used when she went hiking.
“Success!” she said aloud, as she ran back to her spot at the window. She put the binoculars to her eyes and with a little focusing the people looked so close that it felt as if she was in their room. Now, she saw almost every detail. She was able to read the title of the book one guy was reading, the type of beer one girl was chugging and the name on the pizza box that sat idly in one room. These intimate details sucked Melissa in and she slowly forgot about her studying. She became oblivious to the minutes, then hours, that ticked by as she moved her gaze from one window to another, like changing the television channel. Nothing all that exciting happened to these people as she stood for hours in her room, oblivious to the aches in her legs. Nevertheless, she couldn’t pull herself away while there were people awake. Eventually, the people gathered in the rooms dissipated and the tenants began to go to bed. Melissa watched until the last guy tucked himself in and turned off his light. Only then did she peel the binoculars away from her eyes and place them on the windowsill. Part of her wanted to continue watching the people during their most vulnerable moments, but something in the back of her mind crept to the forefront and told her to stop. She stood at the window a moment longer, as if she would resist this command, but then she turned away and looked at her desk. There, sitting exactly where she had left them, were her economics books, still illuminated by the yellow glow of the desk lamp. Reality set in again and a grimace swept across Melissa’s face. Before she moved to the desk, Melissa’s eyes caught sight of the red digital numbers on her alarm clock. Melissa turned away from the books and went about preparing for bed. After going to the bathroom to brush her teeth and relieve herself, she came back, turned off the light and crawled into bed. As she lay in bed, trying desperately to fall asleep, Melissa’s mind kept returning to the people in the windows. Scenes from the rooms kept flashing in her head and she thought about how wonderful those people’s lives seemed from behind her binocular lenses. She was jealous of the fun they seemed to have that night and the images continued to burn into her mind until well after she fell into a deep, unsettling sleep. The next morning couldn’t have been worse for Melissa. She woke up a half-hour late and had to skip her shower so she would arrive at her class on time. Once there, she promptly failed her test in record time, then decided to skip her only other class so she could return to her room and sulk. When she arrived at her abode, Melissa threw her backpack to the ground and tried to forget about the work she should do so that she could have fun for the rest of the weekend. Instead, she walked to her stereo and perused her CD collection. Most of her musical interest lay within the “classic rock” genre and her collection proved that with albums from such bands as Led Zeppelin, The Who, Queen, The Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd. Her eyes finally settled on Pink Floyd’s The Wall. The Wall was one of her favorites, so much so that she owned the studio version, a live version, a live bootleg and even the movie. The album’s themes of solitude and confinement struck a chord deep within and she felt as if every lyric held some personal meaning. It was the perfect album for her mood. Melissa popped the two CDs into her five CD changer and crawled onto her bed, where she laid back and closed her eyes. The first notes struck loud and clear, and Melissa let the music seep into the depths of her body.
Melissa slowly drifted in and out of the waking world as the story of the troubled singer “Pink” unfolded through the music. As she did, images of her previous night’s voyeurism replayed in her mind for the third, sometimes fourth, or fifth time. The lyrics of the ghostly music acted as a soundtrack to mental slideshow, although she was only able to coherently make out bits of them.
After a couple hours, the album ended and Melissa pulled herself out of her dreamlike state, back into reality. The combinations of sights and sounds made Melissa feel alive and filled her with excitement, but it also made her yearn for more. She walked to the place she stood the night before and looked across at the thirty channels of live entertainment. Unfortunately, it was the middle of the afternoon and the sunlight reflecting off the windows made it impossible for her to peer into them. Melissa looked down at her watch and saw that it was only three. Although it was late January and darkness fell across the land relatively early, she still had two good hours before she could resume her invasion of privacy. A dejected look momentarily stole across her young face, but a small smile appeared when she decided that she would fill this void by watching the movie version of The Wall.
She popped the tape into the VCR, resumed her position on the bed and not only listened to, but watched “Pink’s” tragic story unfold. She became so enthralled with the movie that reality totally left her. Even the images of, and her thirst for, the people in the windows were temporarily forgotten as she watched the disturbing mix of actors and animation fill her television screen. She couldn’t pull her eyes away from the psychotic animations of the marching hammers, the horrible schoolteacher, the judge, the entwined plants or the ever-present wall. These ghostly images dug deep into her just as the images of the people in the windows had the night before. When the movie ended, Melissa felt as if something inside her had changes. She knew she was no longer the same Melissa that had existed for the previous nineteen years. The combination of the events in the past twenty-four hours had changed her ever so slightly and although she didn’t know if it was for the better or the worse, she knew it felt good.
As she let this feeling reverberate throughout her body, Melissa noticed that it had become dark and there were lights on in the rooms. She wanted to drop everything and run to the window, but she was extremely hungry and nature was calling. She ran to the bathroom, then to the dining hall where she ate a quick dinner. A half-hour later, she returned to her room with her animal urges satisfactorily quenched. Upon returning to her room, Melissa went straight for her window and looked at the dorm. Before she got too involved, though, she grabbed her chair from the desk and pulled it up to the window. She would not repeat her mistake from the previous night. Her legs still hurt from standing so long.
After finding a comfortable position in the chair, she grabbed her binoculars, brought them into focus and browsed her selection of windows. She finally stopped at a room she had paid a good amount of attention to the night before.
Melissa moved her gaze from one window to another until she had checked all thirty in her view. As evening turned to night, she continued watching the rooms’ tenants come and go, some preparing for a night in, others readying themselves for a night on the town. While she watched these people live out their Friday nights, she found herself labeling the rooms, making it easier for her to refer to them in her mind. The guys in the lower left-hand corner became room “A1” and the girls in the upper right corner became “F5.” The longer she watched, the more Melissa felt that she was part of their community. As the minutes ticked by in their unstoppable march, Melissa continued to spy on the people across from her. She was so transfixed on them, that she barely heard the shrill ringing of her phone around nine o’clock. The first ring seemed very distant, as if it was coming from one of the rooms she was watching. The second ring was decidedly closer and the third ring managed to break through her haze and jolt her back into reality.
Melissa put down her binoculars and stared at the vile communications device that sat on her desk and had rudely pulled her out of her pleasant state. She knew the phone would ring once more before the voicemail activated, but she had no intention of answering it before the messaging started. She didn’t care who was on the other end. Whoever it was, wasn’t important enough to take time out of her peaceful night to talk to. Thus, Melissa just stared at the phone as it rang for the fourth time, then left her in silence. She brought the binoculars back to her eyes and was about to resume her “observations”, when she noticed that she didn’t like the silence. It was fine before, but now she thought it was distracting and eerie. Melissa placed the binoculars down again and walked to her stereo, which still had The Wall in it. She put the CD player on “repeat”, pressed “play” and returned to her chair. As she returned the binoculars to their rightful place before her eyes, the opening chords shattered the deadly silence and soothed her body.
Ah yes. This is so much better, she thought as she focused on one of the rooms. Before long, time lost its meaning again and she immersed herself into the lives of the people she watched. At first, the music overlaid the scenes in her binoculars, but soon the two twisted together, becoming one, just as they did during her dreams that afternoon. This symbiosis brought Melissa’s mind and body to a seemingly utopian plane. These two things dominated her and made her forget about reality. Reality was painful and cruel. However, the world through her binoculars was fun, exciting and a place where she would always be accepted and never accosted by anyone, because no one knew of her existence. She could live with these people, enjoy their lives, assimilate their feelings, all without worrying if she was smart enough, pretty enough or cool enough. Melissa had found her Nirvana.
Melissa watched for two more hours as the sixty or so people in the rooms continued their normal routines. To them, the past couple of nights might not have been exciting, but for Melissa their lives were hundreds of times better than hers. From where she sat, watching television or playing cards on the Internet became as exciting as sky diving. Every event was amplified, intensified beyond belief. Melissa thought that things couldn’t become any better. However, when the eleven o’clock hour came, she found that she was completely wrong. It was at this time when she became a real voyeur.
She had been scanning the rooms, looking for anything out of the ordinary and when her eyes landed on the windows of “B2”, she found something. There, sitting on one of the beds, were a guy and a girl, feverishly fondling each other. Immediately, the other twenty-one active rooms lost importance and Melissa’s eyes locked onto the two bodies. She watched intently as their hands ran over each other’s bodies and slowly articles of clothing were removed. Finally, the two were naked and the guy plunged himself into the girl. Melissa’s whole body shook as if the guy had entered her instead, and her hands gripped the binoculars tighter.
As the guy continued to push himself into the girl, Melissa felt herself cease watching the girl and actually became the girl. Every thrust of the guy’s body rippled through Melissa’s. She felt him inside her, his hands running over her and his hot breath falling upon her. With every thrust, her body reacted in kind, sending waves of pleasure through her. Far away in her subconscious, she heard The Wall mixing with these actions. The aptly titled Young Lust resonated in her ears as moans escaped her lips.
Melissa’s mind screamed at the guy in “B2.” Just then, the guy’s orgasm tore through his body and Melissa him unleashing his seed inside her. Her body shook violently, but she held onto the binoculars all the while. She kept her eyes pinned on the guy as her body slowly settled. Melissa could no longer see the other girl. She had ceased to exist to Melissa a long time before. All that remained was Melissa and the guy. She watched as he got off the bed and walked to the window, where he grabbed the curtain. He started to close it, but he suddenly stopped and looked out across the empty space between him and Melissa. She thought that, for just a second, his eyes locked onto her. Abruptly, the guy closed the curtains and cut Melissa off from his world. She continued to watch the closed curtain while her breathing returned to normal and the sweat evaporated off her body. Finally, she realized there would be no more action in that room for the night, so she directed her gaze to other rooms. She watched for hours, and although nothing as exciting as what happened in room “B2” occurred, she couldn’t pull her eyes away from the open windows. Several times that utopian feeling rushed through her as she placed herself in the rooms she watched. She could feel the floor she sat on or the bed she laid on while in these rooms. She could feel the presence of people all around her and could even hear their conversations. Above, below, around and within all this was the ever present music of The Wall. The lyrics paralleled everything she watched and did, and they spoke to her in way they never had.
Melissa watched the rooms until every last person went to sleep, and then she watched a little more. Eventually, the sun rose and Melissa’s night of voyeurism ended. She placed the binoculars down and stood up. Immediately, her body reacted violently as her stiff muscles screamed and her bladder cried for relief. She half ran, half stumbled to the bathroom, then came back and collapsed on her bed, without realizing the music was still playing. As her mind raced toward deep sleep, a multitude of voices twisted and tumbled through her brain.
Thus went the rest of the weekend. During the day, Melissa slept, ate little food and studied, which she only managed to do for two hours over two days. At night, Melissa entered the lives of the sixty people across from her. She spent hours upon hours watching them, feeling as if she was one of them, as if it was her life. She let nothing distract her from her nightly pleasure. She left the phone and the door unanswered to ensure that she kept her focus. The music of The Wall continually played in the background through all these hours. She rotated through her different versions, but the lyrics were the same hour after hour, day after day. She played the music twenty-four hours a day, even when she wasn’t in the room. On those rare occasions that she did leave the room for food or the bathroom, the lyrics unconsciously ran through her head. This repetition would annoy most people, but it soothed Melissa. It reminded her that the more she slipped into her new world, the better she felt.
By the time the weekend was over, Melissa was buried in her new world. The week that followed didn’t help her situation, starting with Monday, when she slept through all her classes. She only made it to four classes the rest of the week, as she became more isolated. The days may have changed for her, but the nights were always the same. She spent more hours watching her “friends” sleep than she actually spent sleeping. The next weekend was a replica of the previous one and the next week continued the pattern.
During those two weeks, Melissa cared nothing for her real world. Books sat on her desk untouched and homework went undone. She went to a grand total of six classes in ten days and tried to avoid any contact with her friends and professors. Since they didn’t live in one of those thirty room, they were nothing but interlopers trying to deny Melissa her “life.” When she did happen to run into one of them on the street, Melissa spun a lie about how she was really sick and couldn’t get out much. She even fit the part for she had lost ten pounds in two weeks and had huge bags under her eyes.
When the third and fourth weeks rolled around, Melissa continued to skip class, “observe” all night, lose weight and avoid contact with other humans. Watching the rooms every night felt real enough to Melissa that she hardly knew the difference between her two lives. She would have conversations with these people as she “participated” in their activities. Melissa ate, drank, slept, watched television, worked on the computer, talked on the phone, masturbated and even had sex with these people. The life her mind, her view and her music had created was perfect.
During these two weeks, Melissa’s time spent outside of her room and her contact with other people were reduced even further. She now spent less than three hours a day outside her room and most of that time was spent on the toilet, occasionally the shower, or in the dining hall nibbling on what scraps of food she could bring herself to eat. She only went to class once and even then she left halfway through. At best, Melissa checked her voicemail and e-mail every other day and rarely responded to any messages. Almost everyone in her life wanted to talk to her, but Melissa wanted no contact with them. They were part of her old, boring life. That was the life she was trying to leave behind.
On Monday of the fifth week, Melissa managed to drag herself out of her room and to one of her classes. That voice of reason deep in her head, the one she tried so hard to repress, had blasted its way to the forefront and convinced her to go to class. The voice was making its last attempt to keep Melissa based in reality. When she arrived at class, Melissa felt like everyone was watching her and they had good reason to stare. She had lost twenty-five pounds in four weeks and her entire body looked beaten from her living her “life” across the way up to sixteen hours a day. She looked as if she could be the poster child for anorexia or some famine ravaged country.
Throughout the class, Melissa tried desperately to concentrate on the professor. She remembered when economics had meant something to her, but now her mind found better things to clamp onto.
After two agonizing hours, her class ended and she stood to leave. Before she could reach the safety of the door, though, her teacher intercepted her.
“Melissa, can I have a word with you?”
“Uh, sure.”
They sat at the front table, Melissa on one side and her professor on the other. As she suspected, he started by explaining how he was concerned about her because she hadn’t been to class lately. He droned on about how unhealthy she looked and how he wanted to make sure everything was okay. Then he asked her a question which she hadn’t seen coming.
“Melissa, are you on drugs?”
She hesitated for a moment, then sternly replied, “No.”
“Good, because I would hate to have that happened to a nice girl like you. Now, back to this class. You really need to start coming if you want to do well. Blah, blah, blah, blah…” Melissa looked at her professor and saw him for what he really was. In her eyes, he mutated, becoming this horribly disfigured person. He was shaking a stick at her, threatening her. “You will only come to my class! You will forget these other people! They mean nothing! Economics is king!” “NO!” Melissa shouted as she leapt from her chair. The professor looked completely confused, but to Melissa, he was still mocking her. “Get away from me you bastard! I knew you wanted to take everything away from me!”
She bolted from the table and burst through the door, leaving the professor bewildered. She didn’t stop running until she reached the door of her room. She unlocked and opened the door, letting herself back into her sanctuary. As she did, she felt the door push against something and send whatever it was sliding across the carpet to the center of the room. She closed the door, put down her backpack and looked to see what the object was that she moved. She peered at the carpet and saw that it was a lone, red brick.