Alessandra and the Great Glass Elevator

This post is meant to be read while listening to this song:

You know, when I moved here- it was the elevator that I really felt in love with. It’s bizarre, obviously custom, shoved into a corner. It’s triangular inside.
It’s walled in glass on three sides,
and you can see out the window into the apartments across the atrium as you go up. You can see where Daniel and Rene, our only English-speaking neighbors, were at last able to change the blinds Rene said she hated the day they moved in.

The  elevator ride always made me feel like this was all some great glamorous adventure. To live in Vienna, spitting distance from the Opera house. Inevitably, every single time I went up in the elevator to our fourth floor apartment (fifth floor by American standards), this song would get stuck in my head.

It’s been an adventure indeed, perhaps not the great one I imagined, certainly not in the way I imagined it. Certainly it doesn’t seem to have much of a happy ending at the moment. I take the elevator up to the apartment these days, on the rare occasion I have braved going outside for fear of the virus. And I come home to an empty apartment, just me and the walls, and a pile of homework and unfulfilled dreams.

What a secret it seems I am keeping, but barely. What a glass elevator it seems I’ve built around me.

“There is no life I know, to compare with pure imagination.”