Your apartment block

Half the people in your apartment block have left for work by the time my watch reads 9.24 a.m. There is a young woman who steps out with two orbiting kids into the late morning sun at 11.52 a.m., her face seeming sunken and pasty, even from this distance. Then there are two old ladies from level three who emerge together, walking-frame by walking-frame, precisely at 1.37 p.m. – it takes them almost two hours to take all their medication, oral and otherwise, from the time they draw back the curtains at 11.48 a.m. It took me a long time to get past my self-imposed exclusion from this place, but for three days now, I have watched your apartment block, peering in all the windows.

Yesterday, when I saw you getting out of the taxi, I almost dropped the paper cup of coffee in my hand. Half of me wanted to run towards you and the other half collapsed into itself, struggling against a loud irregular thumping within. When the momentum from slamming shut the taxi door turned your body towards my direction, I flinched instinctively, then immediately hated my rather violent reaction. I did not yet want your attention to be drawn to this familiar unfamiliar stranger on the dirty park bench somewhere halfway.

But you didn’t see me, and had already started towards your building. I continued watching, and I was somewhat surprised that your hair was much shorter. Surprised, I suppose, that time is not only marked by the growth of one’s hair, but also by a pair of scissors in skilful hands. I watched as you hunted for your keys whilst standing before your mailbox – the one I had peered into the night before in an effort to resynchronise myself with your thoughts and your life, but it was dark, and the sterile light from the buzzing street lamp was unhelpful in the extreme.

You bent forward now to peer into your mailbox as I had done, as if to smell your letters, oblivious to the flying tail of your woollen scarf flapping upwards behind you. In an instant I wanted nothing more than to bury my face in the woollen warmth, recalling your voice in my ear, the songs and smells, and the sometime music, sometime rhyme. But I was rooted by old time uncertainty returning like an old imaginary friend, undermining me at every turn, haunting me with old anxieties, yours and mine, and half the world’s. I had tried to fight it then, and I wanted to try again, but by then you had stepped inside and the door had silently but firmly closed behind you, and you were out of my life again.

Today my paper cup of coffee is once more unbearable, thick and bitter, the froth weak and limp, and no crema in sight. And it is only 4:16 in the afternoon.