From a First Floor Room

The man moved away from the heaped manuscripts, battered and bent from their countless journeys round the country, now collecting dust on the desk’s corner. He rarely looked at them these days. Their travelling days were over, and they were now left to get buried under rejected sheets of screwed up paper printed with discarded words, crumb coated plates and half-drained mugs. He took his usual place on the threadbare seat by the window, the curtain of which he removed years ago. The identical panes of glass – a collection of distorted swirls and plain sheets - sat in the window frame back when his mother bought the house, but since then the smooth pane that his gaze most often passed through had been fractured, like shattered ice, though still intact.

It was 5 o’clock. His eyes floated lazily along the minuscule fraction of his front garden that was visible from his first floor room. Flowers used to sprout there – flashes of sunset orange and evening lilac. He couldn’t see those colours in the flowers anymore; he had to wait for the sky to bring them to him. Now unruly shrubs enveloped the seemingly shrunken stone wall that divided his space from theirs. It occasionally took him by surprise to see the mass of leaves and branches appear perceptibly larger every time he looked. He would cut it another day. He could do away with it completely if he wanted to. Just not today.

The door across the road swung open, and he dragged his gaze to settle on the figure that would promptly emerge. The woman with fair hair, pink-rimmed eyes and hints of worry lines above her brow strode determinedly down her garden path, her pink slippers impulsively clapping against the hard-packed dirt beneath her feet. In her arms she embraced a cardboard box, brimming with a curious hoard of objects: an oversized shirt, a splintered picture frame, several fatigued books with curling pages, and a partially fragmented wineglass stood most prominent. The man tutted to himself as the woman approached her dustbin, a concentrated yet weary expression on her face, her shoulders tense. Perching the box against the black barrel, she reached for the golden band on her ring finger, yanked it off, and set it atop the trivial assemblage. Just as the box began to leave her rigid clasp to fall into the bin, she froze, her eyes brimming with distress, and cradled the box to her chest more desperately than before. She turned.

He pitied her. Daily he bowed his head with sorrow as she drifted between despondency and acceptance; for her, progression was a near-impossible feat. He pitied that she couldn’t see what he could; the torturous way she went through the motions without true feeling – body like fluid, mind like fog.

He caught the image of her slipping the ring back on her finger in the shadow of the closing door, a neglected, day old newspaper wedged in the post box. Then as customary, a man clothed in a crisp grey suit, tie tethered around his neck, trudged along the pavement. He held an austere posture, his eyes frozen, gouging into empty space. By the time he reached his front door, he had his key in his hand. He placed it in the lock, and with a slight twist of his wrist, eased the door open. He wiped his feet on the doormat – two times, as usual – and vanished into his front room. He wouldn’t see him until 7.25 the next morning.

He thought it a pitiable shame… this man and woman would surface from their shelters the following day, as they had done the day before and as they would do for an infinite number of squandered days to come. In his own unblinking eyes, he mused over them as ghosts; they may as well be non-corporeal for all the difference they made. They drift along weary, worn-down paths without even rustling leaves as they go. But then they simultaneously stand like statues; steadfast in the wind. Or like ice, devoid of the warmth needed to thaw them.

With a conceited sigh, the thought regressed in his mind. The evening winter light was fading, and the man hadn’t noticed the seemingly sudden darkness in his room. He sat in his threadbare chair and watched as the shadows enveloped the clutter on his desk. The lopsided, precariously balanced stacks of paper and loosely balled up notes merged into a shapeless mass in the hazy dusk. He sighed once more; a lonely, dejected lament that disturbed the settled dust on the window sill. He placed his elbow upon it and frowned hollowly at the glass.

It wasn’t his pity, but his empathy that engulfed him.