A Novel in Three Temporal Layers
Light on the wall. A rectangle of it, warm and heavy. I watch it for a while. The dust moves inside the light like something alive, like the light is breathing it.
I do not know what time it is. The question floats through and keeps floating, out the other side, not catching on anything.
My body is here. The sheet has twisted around one leg during the night and the other leg is bare, the air touching it. I move the bare leg slightly to feel more of the air. The air has texture this morning—soft, a little damp. It rained in the night. I remember the sound of it, somewhere in a dream that dissolved when I opened my eyes.
I am thirsty.
This is not a thought. It is a fact of the body, the way the rectangle of light on the wall is a fact of the room. Thirst exists. I exist around the thirst. The thirst will move me eventually, toward water, but for now I let it simply be there, another texture, another presence.
Someone is moving in the apartment above. Footsteps, then water in pipes. They are getting ready for something. Work, probably. The footsteps have that quality—quick, directed, a rhythm that knows where it is going. My own body has no such rhythm this morning. My own body is a stone in a stream, water moving around it.
I think about the person upstairs putting on clothes chosen the night before, eating something fast, checking a phone. I think about the series of movements they will make to get out the door, down the stairs, into the street, toward wherever it is they are expected. The thought is not judgment. It is just seeing. They will do that. I will not do that.
The thirst has grown. It tips me, finally, out of the bed and onto the floor. The floor is cool, almost cold. My feet know this floor—the smooth parts, the rough parts, the place near the window where a board creaks. I stand there for a moment letting my feet remember.
The kitchen is a few steps away. I walk slowly because there is no reason to walk fast. The water comes out of the tap and I drink from the stream, not bothering with a glass, the water running over my chin and down my neck. Cold. Clean. I drink until the thirst is gone and then I drink a little more because the water is good and my body wants it.
Now what?
The question does not trouble me. It sits there, open, a door that leads everywhere and nowhere. I could go back to bed. I could eat something. I could go outside. I could stand here at the sink for an hour watching the water drip from my chin onto the counter. All of these are equally possible. None of them is more right than another.
There is fruit on the counter, a bowl of it. Oranges and something else, something darker. Plums. I pick up a plum and hold it. The skin is tight and cool, purple so dark it is almost black, with a faint dusty bloom on the surface. I do not know who put these plums here. I do not remember buying them. Perhaps someone left them. Perhaps they appeared. It does not matter.
I bite into the plum and the juice runs down my wrist. The taste is sweet and sour together, complicated, alive. I stand in the kitchen eating the plum with juice on my chin and water still dripping from my earlier drink and the light coming through the window now, the rectangle moving, finding me.
The person upstairs leaves. I hear the door, the footsteps on the stairs, then nothing. They are gone into their day, their directed quick-rhythmed day. I am still here with plum juice on my wrist.
I will do something eventually. I always do. The body gets bored with stillness and wants to move. The mind gets curious and wants to see. Something will catch me—a sound, a color, a sudden desire—and I will follow it wherever it goes. This is how my days happen. Not planned. Not directed. Followed.
But for now: the plum. The light. The cool floor under my feet. The taste of water and fruit in my mouth. The morning opening around me like a hand uncurling, like something released.
I am here.
This is enough.
Elena sees him sometimes in the mornings when she’s leaving for work.
He’ll be standing at the window of that ground-floor apartment, just standing there, not doing anything, watching the street or maybe watching nothing at all. The first time she noticed him she thought something was wrong—who stands at a window at seven-thirty in the morning with that look on their face, that dreaming look, like time has stopped?
But nothing was wrong. She learned that later. Nothing is ever wrong with him, or right either. He just is.
They slept together twice, maybe three times—she can’t quite remember, which bothers her more than she wants to admit. It should be the kind of thing you remember precisely. But with him everything blurs. The nights run together. The conversations, if you could call them conversations, never had edges. He would say something and she would respond and he would smile or not smile and then say something else that didn’t follow, that came from somewhere else, and she would try to follow and then give up and just let the words wash over her.
She thinks about him more than she should.
This morning she sees him again, same window, same dreaming look. He’s eating something—a plum, she thinks, though it’s hard to tell from across the street. There’s something on his chin. Juice or water. He doesn’t wipe it away.
Elena is going to be late for work. She’s already going to be late because she couldn’t find her other shoe and then the coffee maker made that sound again, that grinding sound that means it’s dying, and now she’s standing on the sidewalk watching a man eat a plum through a window like she has nothing better to do.
She should keep walking.
She doesn’t.
He hasn’t seen her yet. Or maybe he has and doesn’t care. That’s the thing about him—you never know if he’s seeing you or seeing through you or seeing something else entirely. The first time they slept together she asked him what he was thinking and he said “the color of your shoulder” and she didn’t know what to do with that. Was it a compliment? An observation? A deflection? She still doesn’t know.
He finishes the plum. She watches him look at the pit in his hand like it’s an interesting object, a small discovery. Then he sets it down somewhere—on the windowsill, she thinks—and he looks up, out, and his eyes find her.
He doesn’t wave. He doesn’t smile. He just looks at her with that same expression he has for everything: curious, open, like the world is constantly surprising him in small ways and he doesn’t need to do anything about it.
Elena waves. She doesn’t know why. Her hand just goes up.
He tilts his head slightly. Then he turns away from the window and disappears into the dark of his apartment.
That’s it. That’s all. She stands there for another moment feeling foolish, feeling seen and unseen at the same time, feeling like she’s failed some test she didn’t know she was taking.
She’s definitely late now.
On the train she thinks about the pit on the windowsill. She thinks about how he just left it there like it wasn’t garbage, like it was something worth keeping. She thinks about the juice on his chin. She thinks about how she wanted him to wipe it away and how he didn’t and how that made her feel something she can’t name, something between desire and irritation.
He never asks her anything. That’s what bothers her most. When they were together—if you could call it together—he never asked about her job, her family, her past. He listened when she talked but he didn’t ask. It was like he was content to receive whatever she offered and wanted nothing more.
At first she thought he was selfish. Then she thought he was spiritual, one of those people who lives in the moment. Then she thought he might be damaged, traumatized, dissociated from normal human interaction.
Now she doesn’t know what she thinks.
She wants to see him again. She wants to stand at that window with him and not talk and watch the dust move in the light. She wants to understand what he’s looking at when he looks at nothing.
She wants to be inside whatever he’s inside.
But she has a meeting in twenty minutes and forty-seven emails to answer and a mother who calls every Sunday expecting progress reports on a life that doesn’t feel like progress at all.
The train stops. Elena gets off. The day begins.
She doesn’t think about him again until she’s falling asleep that night, alone, in her own apartment with its carefully arranged furniture and its calendar on the wall and its whole life pointed toward something.
In the dark she sees his face at the window, tilting toward her like a question.
She never answered.
Light comes through the leaves.
This is what waking is: the darkness behind closed lids turning orange, then red, then the slow opening to green and gold and the shapes of branches against sky. The body knows before the mind stirs. Warmth on one side where the sun finds skin. Cool on the other side where shadow still holds.
The one who sleeps here has slept here many times. This hollow between roots, this soft ground where old leaves have made a bed. The smell of it is familiar—earth and rot and the faint sharpness of sap from the tree above. These smells mean safety. These smells mean rest is possible.
Waking happens slowly. There is no reason to hurry. The light will be there. The warmth will be there. The world does not demand anything yet.
First: the body. Fingers moving against the ground, feeling the texture of leaves, the small stones, the dampness underneath. Toes curling, then stretching. The spine shifting, vertebra by vertebra, finding a new position. A breath deeper than the sleeping breaths, filling the chest, expanding the ribs, then releasing in a long slow exhale that is almost a sound but not quite.
Then: the sounds. Birds have been singing since before the light came, but sleeping ears did not hear them. Now they arrive—the high calls and the low ones, the rapid chirps and the long whistles. Somewhere water is moving over stones. Somewhere something large is pushing through undergrowth, far enough away that it is just sound, not concern.
Then: the eyes fully open. The canopy above, the pattern of branches, the way the light breaks through in columns and pools. This too is familiar. This too is known without needing to be remembered. The body has woken here enough times that the seeing is like returning, not discovering.
Thirst.
The body knows thirst before the mind names it. The dryness in the mouth, the way the tongue feels thick, the pull toward water. This is how it works: the body knows, and then the body moves. There is nothing in between. No deciding. No planning. The knowing and the moving are the same thing.
Rising. The muscles complaining slightly—sleep makes the body stiff, and the first movements are slow, careful. Hands pressing against the ground, arms straightening, the weight shifting from lying to sitting to standing. The world changes as the eyes rise higher. New angles. New views. The same place seen differently because the body is in a different position.
The water is not far. The body knows where it is without thinking about direction or distance. The feet know the way. Down the slope, around the large stone with moss on its northern face, through the gap between the two trees that lean toward each other, and there: the stream, still running cold from somewhere higher up where the sun has not yet reached.
Kneeling at the edge. The stones here are smooth and wet. The water is clear enough to see the bottom—pebbles in shades of brown and gray, the occasional flash of something that moves, small and quick. Hands cupping, bringing water to mouth. The coldness of it, the way it fills the dryness, the way the body receives it like something necessary, which it is.
Drinking until the thirst is gone. Then sitting back on heels, watching the water move. The way it bends around stones, the way it catches light, the way it makes sound that is always the same and always different. There is no need to move yet. The water is good to watch. The morning is still cool. The body is content.
Hunger will come later. Hunger always comes. But hunger is not here yet, and there is no reason to act on what has not arrived.
Something moves on the other side of the stream.
The body stills before the eyes find it. This is how it works: the body knows danger before the mind understands. Every muscle holds. The breath goes shallow. The ears strain.
But it is not danger. It is another one. Another body, another set of eyes, watching from the far bank. The one who watches has been there for some time—the body knows this too, knows it was being seen while it drank, while it knelt, while it was not paying attention. This is not alarming. This is how things are. Eyes are everywhere. Being seen is constant.
The other one does not move either. Two bodies on opposite sides of moving water, watching each other. This is a kind of conversation without sound. The watching says: I see you. The watching says: I am here. The watching says: I am not a threat, or I am a threat, or I have not decided yet.
This other one is not a threat. The body knows this. Something in the posture, something in the distance maintained, something in the way the other’s eyes rest without pressing. A watching that is curious, not calculating. A watching that does not want anything except to watch.
A long moment. Water moving between them. Birds continuing their sounds. The sun climbing higher, changing the angle of light, making the water sparkle differently.
Then the other one moves. Not toward, not away—just moving, continuing whatever path was being walked before the watching began. A direction along the far bank, toward where the stream bends. The eyes stay for another moment, then turn forward, and then the other one is going, and then the other one is gone behind the trees.
The body releases. A breath that was held without knowing it was held. The muscles softening again. The morning returning to what it was—water, light, the smell of earth and leaves, the gradual awakening of hunger.
Hunger.
Now it is here. The emptiness in the belly, the body’s request for what it needs. The mind does not decide what to eat or where to find it. The body knows. The body always knows.
Standing. Walking back up the slope, past the mossy stone, through the leaning trees, but not back to the sleeping hollow. A different direction now. Toward where the trees thin and the light is brighter and the ground changes from soft forest floor to harder earth with patches of grass.
There is a place. The body knows this place. A place where things grow that are good to eat—not always, not every time, but often enough that the walking is worth doing. The body has learned this place the way the body learns everything: by going there, by eating, by remembering in the muscles and the feet and the nose.
The smell arrives before the sight. Sweetness. Ripeness. The smell of fruit that is ready, that has been hanging in the sun, that is at the perfect moment between hard and soft. The body moves faster now. Not running—there is no need to run—but with a purpose that was not there before.
The trees here are smaller, with wide leaves and branches that bend low with weight. And there: the fruit. Round shapes, some still green, some yellow, some with the deep orange that means ready. The body reaches up and the hand knows exactly how much pressure to use—not too much, not too little—and the fruit releases from the branch as if it was waiting for exactly this touch.
Biting into it. The juice running down the chin, down the hand, dripping onto the ground. The sweetness filling the mouth, overwhelming everything else. The body does not think about the fruit. The body experiences the fruit. Every part of it—the texture of the skin, the softness inside, the way the teeth sink in, the way the throat swallows, the way the belly receives.
One fruit, then another. Then another. Eating until the hunger is gone, until the body is satisfied, until reaching for more feels like too much effort and stopping feels like enough.
Sitting beneath the tree. The sun is higher now, warm on the back. The morning has become something else—not morning anymore, not yet the heat of midday, but the between time, the time when the body can rest again after the work of waking and drinking and eating.
This is enough.
The body knows this. The body has always known this. There is nothing else that needs to happen. The water was good. The fruit was good. The sun is warm. The other one who watched has gone wherever the other one goes, and there will be other watchings, other moments of eyes meeting across water or through trees, and those too will be what they are, nothing more.
Lying back. The ground is harder here than in the sleeping hollow, but the body adjusts. The body always adjusts. The eyes half-close against the brightness, and the sounds of the world continue around and above and through—the birds, the insects beginning to buzz in the warming air, the distant movement of water, the wind in the leaves.
Somewhere, the one who watched is doing whatever that one does. Somewhere, others are waking or eating or drinking or walking. The world is full of bodies moving through it, each one doing what bodies do, none of them needing to explain or justify or understand.
This is what it is. This is all it is. This is enough.
The sun continues to rise. The warmth deepens. The body rests.
Someone was at the window. Looking at me. I looked back and they waved and then I was interested in something else—the way the light hit the edge of the counter, maybe, or a sound from the pipes—and I moved away. When I looked again they were gone.
I know that person. We have been together. Their body was warm and their sounds were good and afterward they asked questions I couldn’t answer. Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t. The questions didn’t fit anywhere. They were shaped for a different kind of mouth, a different kind of mind.
I don’t remember their name.
This is not unkindness. Names are just sounds that people insist on. The body I remember. The warmth I remember. The sound they made when pleasure took them by surprise—that I remember. The name is a label on a jar and I have no use for jars.
The morning has grown. The light has moved. I find clothes—soft things, things that don’t grip—and I put them on, and then I am at the door, and then I am outside.
The street is alive with purpose. Everyone is going somewhere. I stand on the sidewalk and let the current move around me, all these bodies rushing toward all these urgent appointments. A woman with a briefcase. A man on a phone. Two children being pulled along by a tired adult. The sound of it: footsteps, voices, engines, the hum underneath everything that cities make.
I start walking, not toward anything, just walking. My feet know how to do this. Left, right, left, right. The rhythm is its own reward. I could walk for hours. I have walked for hours. Once I walked all night and ended up in a part of the city I’d never seen and watched the sun come up over a cemetery and it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen and I never went back.
A dog on a leash wants to smell me. I stop and let it. The nose presses against my ankle, my calf, circles around. The owner apologizes, tugging at the leash, but I am already crouching down, offering my hand. The dog licks it. The owner says something about being late and pulls the dog away and I stay crouched for a moment, feeling the wet of the dog’s tongue drying on my skin.
I keep walking.
A bakery. The smell of it reaches me half a block away and I follow it like following a string. Inside, the warmth, the glass cases full of things I don’t know the names of. I point at something round and golden and the woman behind the counter puts it in a bag and tells me a number and I give her paper and she gives me metal and the whole exchange happens without language, which pleases me.
Outside again, eating the round thing, which is flaky and sweet and leaves grease on my fingers. I lick the grease off. An old man on a bench watches me do this. I wave at him with my greasy fingers and he looks away quickly, like I’ve done something wrong.
What did I do wrong?
The question arrives and leaves. I don’t chase it. The old man has his world, his rules about what you do and don’t do on a public street. I am not in his world. I just pass through it, like light through glass, bending a little but not stopping.
There is a park. I didn’t plan to come to the park but here it is, and here I am, and so I go in. Grass, trees, benches, a pond with ducks. Children running. Someone playing guitar badly but with great conviction. I find a spot of sun and I lie down in it like an animal, on my back, eyes closed, the warmth pouring into me.
Time passes. I don’t know how much. The sun moves and I move with it, shifting to stay in the warm spot. At some point the guitar stops. At some point the children leave. At some point I hear my name—or what people call me when they want my attention—and I open my eyes.
Someone is standing over me. Another body I know. Tall, nervous, always moving even when standing still. We worked together once, before I stopped going to work. They look worried.
“Are you okay?” they say.
I consider the question. Okay. What does okay mean? My body feels good. The sun is warm. The grass is soft. The round thing has settled in my stomach like a small happy animal.
“Yes,” I say.
They keep standing there. They want more. People always want more. They want the story, the context, the why-are-you-lying-in-the-grass explanation that makes it make sense.
I close my eyes again.
After a while, they go away.
The sun keeps moving. I keep moving with it. At some point I will get up and go somewhere else. At some point I will be hungry again, or thirsty, or curious. Something will pull me and I will follow.
For now: grass. Sun. The sound of ducks on the pond. The distant traffic like a river, always flowing, never arriving.
For now: this.
Marcus shouldn’t have stopped. He was on his lunch break, forty-five minutes exactly, and he had things to do—pick up the prescription, check his email on his phone, call his sister back about the thing with their mother, eat something. The park was a shortcut, that’s all. He wasn’t there to linger.
But there she was.
Lying in the grass like a dead person. No, not dead—breathing, clearly breathing, that slow deep breathing of someone completely at ease. Eyes closed. Arms spread out. Face tilted up toward the sun like she was drinking it.
He stopped because he thought something was wrong. That was the sensible thing to do. That was what anyone would do. You see a person lying in the grass like that, you check if they’re okay.
“Are you okay?”
She opened her eyes—those eyes, he’d forgotten about those eyes—and looked at him the way she always looked at everything: like he was interesting. Not important, not urgent, just interesting. A cloud passing through her particular sky.
“Yes,” she said. And then she closed her eyes again.
Marcus stood there. He didn’t know what to do. The yes should have been enough. She said she was fine. He could leave now. He should leave now. His forty-five minutes were ticking away and Mrs. Chen at the pharmacy closed the counter at 1:15 sharp and—
But he didn’t leave.
“What are you doing?” he heard himself say.
She didn’t answer. Or maybe lying there not answering was the answer.
She used to work in his department. Data entry, same as him, though she did it differently—she would stare at the screen for long minutes without typing, then type in furious bursts, then stare again. Their supervisor hated it. The metrics didn’t work that way. You were supposed to maintain steady productivity, X keystrokes per hour, Y records processed per shift.
She didn’t maintain anything. She just did things when she did them and didn’t do things when she didn’t.
One day she stopped coming to work. No notice, no explanation. HR sent emails that bounced. Someone went by her apartment and the super said she was still there, she just didn’t answer the door sometimes. Or any time.
That was three months ago. Marcus thought about her sometimes, late at night when he couldn’t sleep, wondering what had happened. Drug problem? Mental breakdown? Some crisis that explained everything?
But lying here in the grass she didn’t look like someone in crisis. She looked like the most peaceful person he’d ever seen.
He wanted to lie down next to her.
The thought arrived from nowhere and horrified him. Lie down in the grass? In the middle of the day? In his work clothes? What would people think? What if someone from the office saw him?
But he could imagine it. The sun on his face. The grass beneath him. The permission to just... stop. To not be going anywhere or doing anything or meeting any metric for one single moment of his measured-out life.
“I have to go,” he said.
She didn’t respond.
“I have things to do.”
Nothing.
“It was... it’s good to see you.”
Was it? He didn’t know. Seeing her made him feel strange—itchy, restless, like his skin didn’t fit right. Like everything he did with his days was suddenly visible as a choice rather than a necessity.
He walked away. He got the prescription. He ate a sandwich at his desk. He called his sister back and listened to the thing about their mother and made appropriate sounds. He worked until five-thirty and then worked until six-fifteen because there was a backlog and you didn’t leave when there was a backlog.
That night, in his apartment with its clean surfaces and its bills paid and its nothing out of place, he stood at the window and looked out at the city and thought about lying in the grass.
What would happen if he just stopped?
He didn’t know. That was the terrifying thing. He genuinely didn’t know what would happen. The money would run out. The apartment would go. People would worry, then be angry, then forget. And then—what? What was on the other side of all the things he did to stay in place?
She knew. She was living there, in that other place, that place where you just lay in the grass because the grass was there and the sun was warm and there was no other reason needed.
Marcus went to bed early. He set three alarms. He dreamed of green grass and a voice saying yes and when he woke up he couldn’t remember if the dream had been a nightmare or the opposite of a nightmare.
He got up. He showered. He went to work.
What else was there to do?
Grass. Tall. This body inside it.
Blue above. White shapes moving through blue. Light on skin. Warm where light touches. Cool where shadow.
The ground under. Hard under soft. Hip shifts. Shoulder shifts. Head turns. Small movements until the lying is good.
Eyes close partway. Blue becomes red through the skin of lids. Gold at edges. Wind moves grass. Sound of that. Buzz of small flying things. A call from somewhere.
Sun moves. Or this body moves under it. The warm spreads.
Then—
Skin prickles. Tight in the belly. Tight in the legs. Eyes open. Looking through grass.
There. Where grass ends and trees begin. Shapes standing. Not moving. Eyes in the shapes. Eyes on this body.
This body not moving. The shapes not moving. Grass between. Wind moving it. Sun still there.
The shapes are tight. This body sees: weight forward, hands ready. Tight answers tight. Belly tight here. Legs ready here.
One shape makes sound. Other shapes make sound back. Hands move.
This body: eyes on them, belly tight, legs ready.
One shape moves closer. Stops. Sounds from other shapes. The one that moved closer moves back.
Breathing. Belly still tight. Eyes still watching.
The shapes turn. One then another then more. Moving toward trees. Smaller. Into trees. Gone.
Breath out. Long. The tight becomes loose. Belly soft. Legs soft. The lying again.
Grass. Sun. Blue.
The shapes were here. Now not here. Eyes were on this body. Now no eyes. What happened happened. It is not still happening.
Something small moves in the grass. Many legs. Back that catches light. Climbing a stem. This body watches. The small thing climbs. Stops. Climbs. Reaches the top of the stem. Stays. Climbs back down.
Sun moves. Shadows longer at grass edge.
The belly begins to feel empty. Not yet the moving-toward-food emptiness. Just: less full than before. The body notes this the way it notes the shadow. It is there.
Dry in the mouth begins. Not yet the moving-toward-water dryness. Just: less wet than before.
Later the emptiness will pull the body up. Later the dryness will move the feet toward water. Now the emptiness and dryness are small. Smaller than the warm. Smaller than the soft. The body stays.
Eyes close. Red dark. Warm on skin. Sound of grass. Sound of flying things.
The shapes that watched are somewhere. Doing whatever shapes do. This body is here. Doing this. Lying. Warm. Breath going in. Breath going out.
Grass holds this body. Ground holds grass. Whatever holds ground holds that.
In. Out. In. Out.
The small flying things. The wind. The grass moving when wind moves.
In. Out.
Warm.
Still.
Here.
The sun has moved behind the buildings and the grass is getting cold. I get up slowly, feeling my body recalibrate to standing. Stiff in places. Good stiff. The stiff of having been still for a long time.
Hunger is here now, the real kind, the stomach kind. I walk toward it—toward food, toward the part of the city where food lives in windows and on carts and in the hands of people who will give it to you if you give them paper.
The evening crowd is different from the morning crowd. Slower. Looser. People going toward pleasure instead of away from rest. I like the evening crowd. They have already done their day’s worth of doing and now they are allowed to simply be, at least for a few hours, before the night pushes them back into their beds to do it all again.
I eat something on a stick. Meat, charred, sweet sauce. I don’t know what kind of meat. It doesn’t matter. The taste is good. The heat of it goes down into me and I stand there by the cart eating until there is only a wooden stick and I give the stick back to the man and he throws it away.
Someone is looking at me.
I feel it before I see it—that particular pressure of being watched with intent. Not the idle glances of strangers, but the focused gaze of someone who wants something.
I turn and find them. Across the street, leaning against a wall. Dark hair, dark eyes, a mouth that’s almost smiling. They don’t look away when I see them. They hold my gaze and their almost-smile becomes an actual smile.
I cross the street.
Up close they smell like cigarettes and something else, something sharp and clean underneath. They are taller than me. Their eyes have gold in them, flecks of it, catching the light from the streetlamp.
“You walk like you’re not going anywhere,” they say.
“I’m not.”
“Where did you come from?”
“The park.”
“Where are you going?”
“I don’t know.”
Their smile widens. They like this. Most people don’t like this, but they do. I can feel it—the pleasure they take in my not-knowing, like it’s a gift I’m offering.
“Do you want to come with me?”
I consider. My body is warm from the meat. The evening is cool. This person is interesting—their smell, their gold-flecked eyes, the way they lean.
“Yes,” I say.
We walk. They tell me things—their name, which I will forget, the place they work, which means nothing to me, something about a roommate who is out of town. I listen the way I listen to birds or traffic, letting the sounds wash over me without catching.
Their apartment is small and warm and smells like them. They offer me water. I drink it. They put on music, something low and slow. We stand in the middle of their room and they touch my face with their fingertips, tracing the line of my jaw.
“You’re strange,” they say. It’s not a complaint.
I don’t say anything. I put my hand on their chest, feeling the heartbeat beneath cloth and skin and bone. It’s fast. Mine is slow. We stay like that for a while, hand to chest, hand to face, the music moving around us.
Then we’re not standing anymore. Then clothes are coming off and skin is meeting skin and the cold evening is gone, replaced by heat, by friction, by the sounds bodies make when they stop pretending to be anything other than bodies.
They are hungry. I can feel it—a hunger that goes beyond flesh, a need to consume, to possess, to hold onto something. Their hands grip. Their teeth find my shoulder. They want to leave marks, evidence, proof that this happened.
I let them.
Not because I want to be marked, but because their wanting is its own kind of beauty. The fierceness of it. The desperation underneath the confidence. They need this—need me, need something—and I can give it, for a while, for this stretch of hours in this small warm room.
Afterward we lie in their bed and they ask the questions everyone asks. Who are you. What do you want. Why aren’t you like other people.
I trace patterns on their chest and do not answer.
They fall asleep eventually, one arm thrown across me, heavy and warm. I watch the ceiling. The music has stopped and the room is silent except for their breathing.
I could stay. They would like that—waking up next to me, making breakfast, extending this into something with a shape and a name.
But the night is pulling at me. The window is open a crack and I can smell the city outside, the cool dark air, the thousand other places I could be.
I slide out from under their arm. I find my clothes. At the door I look back at them—the tangle of sheets, the bare shoulder, the face softened by sleep.
They gave me something. I gave them something. The exchange is complete.
I leave.
The street is empty now, late enough that even the evening crowd has gone home. I walk, letting the cool air dry the sweat on my skin. My body feels good—used, alive, humming with the memory of touch.
Tomorrow I won’t remember their name. I might not remember their face. But I’ll remember this—the gold flecks in their eyes, the way their hands gripped, the sound of their breathing in the dark room.
That’s enough. That’s what there is.
I walk home, or what I call home, or what is home for now. The city sleeps around me. I am awake, moving through it like water through stone.
Alone. Not lonely.
There’s a difference.
Sasha wakes with their arm reaching for something that isn’t there.
The bed is still warm on the other side. The indent in the pillow still holds the shape of a head. But the person—the strange, beautiful, impossible person—is gone.
Sasha lies there for a moment, letting the absence settle. They didn’t hear the door. They’re usually a light sleeper, waking at every creak, but somehow this person slipped out without making a sound. Like a ghost. Like something that was never quite solid to begin with.
They think about the night. The way the person crossed the street with no hesitation, no performance, just walked directly toward Sasha like the most natural thing in the world. The way they said yes without asking what they were agreeing to. The way they never tensed up, never second-guessed, never did any of the normal things people do when they go home with a stranger.
Sasha had wanted to consume them. That’s the only word for it. There was something in that blank openness, that complete lack of agenda, that made Sasha want to grab hold and not let go. To mark them. To make them remember.
Did it work?
They think about the way the person traced patterns on their chest afterward, not looking at Sasha, just touching, like Sasha’s body was a surface to explore rather than a person to connect with. The way they didn’t answer questions. Not refusing, not deflecting—just not answering, like the questions didn’t reach them, like they lived in a different language.
Sasha gets up. The apartment feels emptier than it should. They check the bathroom, the kitchen, already knowing they won’t find anyone. The person is gone. They didn’t leave a note. They didn’t leave a number. They didn’t even leave a mess—the water glass is clean and dry by the sink.
Did that actually happen?
For a moment Sasha wonders if they dreamed it. The whole thing—the street, the crossing, the night—feels distant already, like something from a long time ago. But there are marks on their shoulder. Four small bruises from fingertips. Proof.
They stand in front of the mirror and look at the marks. They should feel used. They should feel angry, or hurt, or at least annoyed that someone left without saying goodbye.
Instead they feel—
What?
Sasha doesn’t know the word. It’s something like awe. Something like fear. Something like having seen an animal in the wild, close up, and knowing that you’ll never get that close again.
They shower. They make coffee. They go through the motions of a morning, but the motions feel thin, like a film over something else. Under the routine, their mind keeps returning to that person. The way they moved. The way they listened without asking. The way they left.
Sasha has been with people who leave before morning. It’s not unusual. It’s practically a cliché—the one-night stand, the empty bed at dawn, the walk of shame or stride of pride or whatever you want to call it. They know this script.
But this felt different.
The others left because they were embarrassed, or busy, or keeping their options open. This person left because—why? There was no embarrassment. No apology. Just absence, like a wave receding, like something natural and inevitable.
They gave me something. I gave them something. The exchange is complete.
Sasha doesn’t know where that thought comes from, but it feels true. The night was whole and finished in itself. It wasn’t a beginning. It wasn’t an audition. It was just—what it was.
They find they’re okay with that.
More than okay. There’s something clean about it. No texts to parse. No awkward morning conversation. No wondering what it meant or where it’s going. It went where it was always going: nowhere. Everywhere. Into the past, which is the only place anything goes.
Sasha laughs, suddenly, standing alone in their kitchen with coffee going cold in their hands.
They’ll never see that person again. They know this with absolute certainty. The person is not somewhere waiting for a call. The person is already somewhere else, doing something else, being whatever they are without Sasha, without anyone.
It should hurt. Or at least sting.
It doesn’t.
Sasha drinks the cold coffee. They get dressed. They go to work. They tell no one about the night, because what would they say? I met someone who was free, and they let me hold them for a few hours, and then they left, and I think that’s the most honest thing that’s ever happened to me.
Who would understand that?
The marks on their shoulder fade over the next few days. By the following week there’s no evidence at all. But sometimes, late at night, Sasha thinks about crossing that street. The directness of it. The lack of performance.
They try to walk like that sometimes. Like they’re not going anywhere. Like the destination doesn’t exist.
They can’t do it. Not really. But they keep trying.
Dark. But not the full dark. Light coming from somewhere low, orange, moving. Fire that others made. This body near it but not closest. Warm on one side. Cool on the other.
Other bodies around the fire. Some sitting. Some lying. Sounds between them—low sounds, soft sounds, the sounds that come when bodies are not moving much. The fire makes its own sound. Cracking. Hissing when sap finds heat.
This body sits. Watching the fire. The way it moves without moving from its place. The way the light reaches out then pulls back. The way the dark shapes of others flicker at the edges.
Another body moves closer. Sits near this body. Not touching. The space between—a hand’s width, maybe less. The warmth of that body reaches across the space. Different warmth than fire. Body warmth.
This body turns. Looks at that body. That body looks back.
Eyes in firelight. The orange moving in them. The dark of the center. Looking and being looked at. No sound between. Just the looking.
The space between gets smaller. Not because either body decided. The bodies lean. The space closes. Shoulder touches shoulder. The warmth where they meet.
Breathing. This body’s breath. That body’s breath. Not the same but close. Almost matching. Almost one rhythm.
A hand moves. That body’s hand. Touches this body’s arm. Light touch. The skin feels it—each small point where the fingers rest. Warm. Alive. A hand with blood moving in it.
This body’s hand moves. Finds that body’s leg. Rests there. Through skin, the hardness of muscle. The shape of bone beneath. The warmth going both ways now—hand to leg, hand to arm.
The other bodies around the fire are there but not there. They exist but they are not in this. What is happening is between these two bodies. A world that is shoulder-and-shoulder. Hand-and-arm. Hand-and-leg. Breath-and-breath.
That body stands. This body stands. The hands stay—this body’s hand on that body’s hip now, that body’s hand on this body’s back. Standing together in the firelight.
Walking. Away from the fire. Into the darker dark where the orange light doesn’t reach. The others by the fire do not watch or do watch—it doesn’t matter. The walking happens.
A place where the ground is soft. Leaves. Old and dry. They make sound when the bodies lower onto them. The crackle and hush of settling.
Lying now. Facing. The firelight far enough that the bodies are shape and shadow, not detail. But the hands see. The skin sees. Every place where this body meets that body—the seeing happens through touching.
Mouth finds mouth. Soft and warm and wet. Breath shared. The taste of the other—what was eaten, what was drunk, the taste underneath that is just that body.
Hands move. Finding places. The curve of hip. The hollow of throat. The ridge of spine. Each place different. Each place warm. The hands learn the other body the way feet learn a path—by going there, by feeling what is there.
Bodies closer. No space between now. Skin to skin where the coverings are moved aside. The warmth not from fire anymore. Warmth made between. Warmth made by touching.
Moving together. A rhythm that is not decided. The bodies find it. The way breath finds rhythm, the way walking finds rhythm. Something that happens because bodies are bodies and this is what bodies do.
Sound. Low sounds. Not words. The sounds that come up from the belly, from the chest, from the throat without choosing. This body makes them. That body makes them. The sounds go into the dark and the dark holds them.
The rhythm faster. The warmth deeper. Something building that has no name. The skin is all awake. Every part of it. The place where the bodies join is the center of everything. Everything else—the dark, the distant fire, the others, the ground—far away. Only this. Only here. Only these two bodies moving.
Then—
A crest. A peak. A moment where the rhythm breaks and becomes something else. The body tight then loose then tight then loose. Shaking. Sound that is almost a cry. The other body too—the same crest, the same breaking, the same shaking.
Then still.
Breath loud in the quiet. Hearts beating—this body feels that body’s heart through the chest pressed against chest. Fast. Slowing. Fast. Slowing.
The warmth changes. Not the heat of before. A different warmth. Heavy. Soft. The bodies still pressed together but not moving now. Just lying. Just breathing. Just warm.
Sleep comes. Comes for both or comes for one and then the other. The dark gets darker. The fire somewhere is dying or being fed—it doesn’t matter. Here is here. These bodies wrapped together on the soft leaves, breath slowing, hearts slowing, the warmth held between.
Light. Gray light. The light before the sun clears the trees.
This body wakes. That body is there—still there, still warm, still breathing slow. Sleep breathing. This body watches for a moment. The face in gray light. The mouth soft. The eyes closed. The chest rising, falling, rising, falling.
Then this body moves. Slowly. Not to wake the other. Untangling from the warmth. The cool air on skin where the warmth was. The body shivers once.
Standing. Finding the coverings. Putting them on. The other body still sleeping. A shape on the leaves.
Walking. Away from the place. Toward—it doesn’t matter. Away. The feet find a direction and follow it. The gray light getting brighter. The air still cool. Birds beginning.
Behind, the other body sleeps or wakes. It doesn’t matter. What happened happened. Now this body is walking. The walking is what is happening now.
The warmth of the night is still there—in the muscles, in the skin, in some deep place that doesn’t have a name. The body carries it while walking. Not thinking about it. Just carrying it the way the body carries everything. The way the body carries its own weight through the world.
Light comes through trees. The gray becomes gold. The air warms.
The walking continues. Where, it doesn’t matter. The body will know when it gets there. The body will know when it wants to stop.
The other body is somewhere now. Doing whatever that body does. Maybe waking to find this body gone. Maybe sleeping still. It doesn’t matter. The warmth happened. The touching happened. The sounds in the dark happened. Now the walking happens.
This is how it is. This is how it has always been. Bodies meet. Bodies warm each other. Bodies go separate directions when the warming is done.
The sun clears the trees. The day begins.
This body walks into it.
Someone has died. A person I knew, once, in another configuration of my life. Someone calls me to tell me this, and I listen to the sounds they make—the broken sounds, the wet sounds—and I say the things you say. Then they tell me when and where, and I say I’ll be there, and then the call ends and I stand with the phone in my hand looking at the wall.
The wall has a crack in it I never noticed before. A thin line running from ceiling to floor, almost invisible unless the light hits it right.
Death.
The word sits in me like a stone. Not heavy, exactly. Just present. A fact taking up space.
I remember the dead person. Their laugh, which came from low in their belly. The way they walked, leaning slightly forward like they were always chasing something. The taste of their cooking, which was always too salty but made with such attention that you couldn’t complain. These memories do not feel sad. They feel like memories—shapes in the mind, residue of contact.
The funeral is three days away. I don’t know what I’ll do for three days. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do for three days. Grieve, I think. That’s the word. People grieve. They wear black and cry and gather together and say how terrible it is.
I look at the crack in the wall.
The funeral is in a building I’ve never been to, full of people I half-remember. They stand in clusters, speaking in low voices, touching each other on the arm and the shoulder. The air smells like flowers and something else—something chemical, something trying to cover up what death smells like.
I wear what I found: dark pants, a dark shirt. Good enough. Some people look at me and their eyes narrow like I’ve done something wrong. Maybe I have. Maybe there’s a way to dress for death that I don’t know.
There’s a box at the front of the room. Inside the box is the body of the person I knew. Except it’s not the person—it’s the leftover, the husk, the thing that remains when the moving part stops moving. I go up to look at it because everyone is going up to look at it.
The face doesn’t look like them. It looks like a sculpture of them, made by someone who only saw photographs. The skin has the wrong texture. The hands are folded in a way they never would have folded their hands.
I stand there longer than other people stand. Someone touches my elbow, trying to move me along, but I don’t move. I’m looking at the stillness. The absolute stillness of a body that used to move.
This is where everything goes.
Not a thought. A fact. A fact of the body standing before another body that has stopped.
The service happens. People speak. They say things about the dead person—stories, memories, the qualities they want to preserve. They cry. They laugh at the right parts. They hold hands. I sit in the back and let the sounds wash over me.
I don’t cry. I don’t feel the pressure behind my eyes that means tears are coming. I don’t feel much of anything except presence. I am here, in this room, with this dead person and these living people, and the air smells like flowers and chemicals, and the light through the stained glass makes colored shapes on the floor.
A child is sitting two rows ahead of me. They keep turning around to look at me instead of at the speaker. Their face is curious, not sad. They don’t understand yet what this is, what this room is for, why everyone is making these sounds. They’ll learn. But for now they’re just here, the way I’m just here, watching shapes move.
Afterward, there’s food in another room. Sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Tiny desserts on tiny plates. I eat because I’m hungry and the food is there. An old woman comes up to me and takes my hands in hers. Her skin is paper-thin. I can see the bones beneath.
“They would have wanted you here,” she says. “They loved you, you know.”
I look at her. I don’t know what to say to this. The dead person is dead. What they wanted doesn’t exist anymore. What they loved doesn’t exist anymore. There’s just us, the living, eating sandwiches and saying words to each other in a room full of flowers.
“Thank you,” I say, because that’s what you say.
She squeezes my hands and moves on to the next person.
I leave before the food is gone. Outside, the sun is bright, obscene almost—how dare it shine like that when someone’s body is lying in a box? But of course it shines. The sun doesn’t know about death. The sun just does what it does, burning and burning until someday it stops.
I walk home, or whatever home is, and the streets are full of people who don’t know anyone has died. They’re buying coffee and checking phones and arguing about nothing. Death happens all the time, everywhere, constantly, and still the streets are full.
That night I lie in bed and look at the ceiling and think about the stillness in the box. The absolute stillness. I try to imagine my own body that still. I can’t. My chest keeps rising and falling. My heart keeps beating. The machine keeps running.
Until it doesn’t.
I don’t know if I’m sad. I don’t know what sad means, really, when you get down to it. There’s a space where the dead person used to be, and now the space is empty, and emptiness has a texture, a particular weight.
But so does everything else.
The ceiling is white. The night is quiet. The body in the box will go into the ground tomorrow and start the long process of becoming something else. And I’ll still be here, for a while longer, looking at walls and eating plums and following desire wherever it leads.
That’s the arrangement. That’s what it is to be the kind of thing that dies.
I close my eyes. I sleep.
Naomi watches her cousin through the whole service and cannot believe what she’s seeing.
Or rather, what she’s not seeing. No tears. No trembling lip. No hand pressed to chest. Nothing. Just that face, that strange smooth face, watching the proceedings like someone observing an interesting documentary about death practices in a foreign culture.
They were close once, Naomi and this cousin. Years ago, before—before whatever happened. They used to climb trees together. They used to whisper secrets in the dark at family gatherings. They used to be almost the same person, thinking each other’s thoughts, finishing each other’s sentences.
Then something shifted. Naomi doesn’t know when exactly. Gradually, then all at once. Her cousin stopped calling. Stopped coming to things. Stopped being reachable in the normal ways people are reachable. The family whispered about it—drugs, maybe, or a breakdown, or just the particular cruelty of the world working on a sensitive soul.
But looking at her cousin now, Naomi doesn’t see someone broken. She sees someone terrifyingly intact.
At the coffin, her cousin stood longer than anyone. Just stood there, looking down, with an expression Naomi couldn’t read. Not grief—she knows grief, she’s drowning in grief, her whole body is grief right now. Not shock. Not denial. Just... attention. Like the dead body was a puzzle to be studied.
When Grandmother took her cousin’s hands and said that thing about love, Naomi watched her cousin’s face. Nothing. No flicker. “Thank you,” her cousin said, polite and empty as a hotel room.
It makes Naomi want to scream.
She’s crying, obviously. She’s been crying for days. Uncle David was—he was everything. He taught her to fish and to drive and to tell the difference between a real apology and a fake one. He was the only adult who ever treated her like a person instead of a future person. And now he’s in a box and everyone is eating tiny sandwiches and her cousin is standing by the window with a cucumber sandwich in hand, looking out at the parking lot like there’s something interesting happening there.
There isn’t. It’s a parking lot. Cars. Asphalt. Nothing.
Naomi crosses the room. She doesn’t know what she’s going to say. She just knows she has to say something.
“Hey.”
Her cousin turns. Those eyes—those unsettling eyes that seem to see everything and care about nothing. “Hey.”
“I didn’t think you’d come.”
“Someone called. They told me the time.”
“That’s not—” Naomi stops. What is she trying to say? That showing up isn’t enough? That you have to feel something, show something, prove something? “How are you?”
Her cousin considers this. Actually considers it, like it’s a real question requiring thought. “I don’t know. How are you supposed to be?”
“Sad. You’re supposed to be sad. He’s dead.”
“Yes.”
“That’s it? Just ‘yes’?”
“What else is there?”
Naomi feels her throat closing. She’s going to cry again, in front of everyone, in front of this strange person who used to be her cousin and is now something else. “Don’t you care? Didn’t you love him?”
Her cousin looks at her. Really looks, and for a moment Naomi sees something beneath the surface—not grief, exactly, but not nothing either. A depth she can’t measure.
“I remember him,” her cousin says. “I remember what he was like. The way he laughed. The way he smelled like sawdust and aftershave. The way he could tell when something was wrong without you saying anything.”
“Then how can you just stand there?”
“Where else would I stand?”
Naomi doesn’t have an answer. Her cousin finishes the sandwich, wipes fingers on dark pants, and looks back out the window.
“He’s dead,” her cousin says, not to Naomi, maybe not to anyone. “The way he laughed doesn’t exist anymore. The sawdust smell is gone. The thing that knew when something was wrong—that’s gone too. What’s left is memories, and memories are just shapes in the mind. They’ll fade. Everything fades.”
“That’s horrible.”
“Is it?”
“Yes. It’s horrible. It means nothing matters.”
Her cousin turns back to her, and there’s something almost like kindness in those strange eyes. “I didn’t say nothing matters. I said everything fades. That’s different.”
“How? How is that different?”
“The plum I ate this morning mattered while I was eating it. The sun on my skin in the park mattered while it was happening. Uncle David mattered when he was alive. Now he’s dead and that time is over, but it doesn’t mean it didn’t matter when it was happening.”
Naomi stares at her. “You’ve lost your mind.”
“Maybe.”
“You need help.”
“Maybe.”
“Don’t you want to be normal?”
Her cousin smiles—a real smile, the first real expression Naomi has seen. “What’s normal?”
“This. Being sad. Crying. Feeling like your heart is breaking.”
“Your heart is breaking?”
“Yes. Obviously.”
Her cousin nods, slowly. “I don’t think mine breaks that way. I think it breaks differently. Or maybe it doesn’t break at all. I don’t know what I have instead of breaking.”
Naomi can’t be here anymore. She can’t listen to this. She walks away, finds her mother, buries her face in familiar fabric and cries until she can’t breathe.
Later, when she looks up, her cousin is gone. No goodbye. No hug. Just absence, like something that evaporated.
That’s the last time Naomi sees her cousin for years. She thinks about that conversation sometimes, late at night when grief comes back, as it does, in waves. Everything fades. It doesn’t mean it didn’t matter when it was happening.
She never knows if it helps or makes everything worse.
The body on the ground is not moving.
This body stands looking. The body on the ground—one this body has seen many times. The smell of it is familiar. The shape. The way it held itself when it was moving. Now it holds itself no way. It lies the way a fallen branch lies. The way a stone lies.
Others stand around. Bodies that have been together a long time. Bodies that know each other’s smells, each other’s sounds, each other’s shapes. They stand and look at the body on the ground.
The chest of that body does not rise. Does not fall. The eyes are open but not seeing. Looking at something or nothing. The skin has changed—the color different, gray under the brown. The smell different too. Something starting underneath. Something that was not there before.
This body moves closer. Kneels. A hand reaches out. Touches the shoulder of the body on the ground. Cold. Not the cold of water or stone. A different cold. The cold of something that was warm and is not warm anymore.
One of the other bodies makes a sound. High. Long. A sound that comes from deep inside. Others make the sound too. The sound fills the air around the body on the ground. This body does not make the sound. This body kneels and touches the cold shoulder and watches.
The face. The mouth is open slightly. The lips dry. There will be no more breath through that mouth. No more sounds. The face that moved, that showed what was happening inside, now shows nothing. The stillness of it. The not-being-there of it even though it is there.
Time passes. The sun moves. The sounds from the other bodies come and go. Sometimes high, sometimes low. Sometimes sound, sometimes quiet. They move around the body on the ground. Some touch it. Some kneel like this body kneels. Some stand at a distance.
Flies come. Small, buzzing. Landing on the body on the ground. On the face. On the hands. One of the other bodies waves them away. They fly up, then land again. They will keep coming. This is what flies do.
The smell gets stronger as the sun gets higher. The thing that is starting underneath, the thing that is not the smell of a body that breathes, it grows. It fills the nose. Some of the other bodies move back. Their faces change—noses wrinkling, mouths tight.
This body stays. Kneeling. The hand still on the cold shoulder. Looking at the face that does not look back.
What was there is not there. The thing that made the body move, made the eyes see, made the mouth make sounds—it is not there. The body is there. The shape. The skin. The hair. Everything that could be seen before can be seen now. But the thing that was behind the seeing, the thing that was inside—gone. Or not gone. Not anywhere. Just not.
This body breathes in. Breathes out. The chest rises. Falls. The heart beats. The blood moves. All the things that are not happening in the body on the ground are happening in this body. For now. Not always. Someday this body too will lie like that body lies. The chest still. The eyes empty. The smell starting.
This is known. Not thought. Known the way the body knows how to walk, how to sleep, how to find water. Known in the bones. In the blood. The body on the ground shows what all bodies become. The body on the ground is the future of this body and every body.
The sun is high now. The heat pressing down. The smell very strong. The other bodies are talking—not words but sounds, gestures, the way bodies communicate when they need to decide something together. There is much movement. Pointing. Looking at the body on the ground, then at a direction, then at each other.
They will move it. This body understands. They will carry it somewhere or leave it here. Either way, they will go. The living bodies will go and the not-living body will stay or be moved. This is how it works. The living cannot stay with the not-living. The living have to keep living.
One of the other bodies comes close to this body. Makes sounds. Gestures. Wants this body to stand. Wants this body to stop touching the cold shoulder.
This body does not move.
The other body makes more sounds. Louder. The hand gestures bigger. The face tight. Something in that body does not like what this body is doing. Sitting with the not-moving one. Not making the high sounds. Not moving around with the others.
This body looks at that body. Meets the eyes. The eyes of the other are wet. The breathing fast. Something happening in there—this body can see it but does not feel it. This body feels the cold shoulder under the hand. The hard ground under the knees. The sun on the back. These things.
The other body turns away. Makes a sound—short, sharp. Walks back to the others.
This body stays.
The body on the ground does not care if this body stays or goes. Does not care about anything. Does not. The eyes look at nothing. The hands do not move. Flies land and the hands do not wave them away.
This body removes the hand from the cold shoulder. Stands. The knees ache from kneeling. The body stretches.
Looking down at the body on the ground. One more time. Seeing the shape of it. Holding that shape somewhere inside. Then turning. Walking. Away from the body on the ground. Away from the other bodies and their sounds and their gestures.
Walking into the trees. The shade. The cool after the sun’s heat. The smell of leaves and earth instead of the other smell.
Behind, the other bodies will do what they do. Carry or leave. Make sounds or go quiet. It does not matter. The body on the ground is not there anymore—the part that mattered is not there. What is left is for flies and time.
This body walks. The legs move. The heart beats. The breath goes in and out. Alive. For now. Walking through the trees while the light comes down in pieces through the leaves.
Somewhere ahead, water. The body can smell it. The walking turns toward the smell. Toward water. Toward what the living body needs.
Behind, getting smaller with distance, the others and the body that does not move.
Ahead, water. Trees. The day continuing.
This body continues with it.
There is a man at my door. He is talking loudly and his face is the color of raw meat and he is using words I recognize but don’t feel connected to. Rent. Lease. Eviction. Final notice.
I watch his mouth move. The way spit gathers at the corners when he says certain sounds. The way a vein in his forehead pulses. He is very angry. I understand this the way I understand weather—as a condition of the environment, something to be observed.
“Are you even listening to me?”
“Yes.”
“Then what are you going to do about it?”
I consider. The apartment behind me is where I live for now. It has a window with good light and a crack in the wall I’ve grown fond of. It has the plum pit still sitting on the windowsill, dried now, a small brown stone.
“I don’t know,” I say.
This is the wrong answer. His face gets redder. More words come out—legal words, threatening words, words about what will happen if I don’t do whatever it is I’m supposed to do. I listen to the rhythm of them. Angry speech has a particular cadence. Staccato. Percussive. He’s playing drums with his mouth.
“You have until Friday,” he says finally. “Then I’m changing the locks.”
He turns and walks away, his footsteps heavy on the stairs. I stand in the doorway for a while after he’s gone, feeling the air from the hallway mix with the air from my apartment. Two different temperatures meeting.
Friday.
I don’t know what day it is today. The days don’t have names in my head. They have qualities—bright ones and dim ones, warm ones and cold ones—but not names. Friday could be tomorrow or next week. It doesn’t matter until it arrives, and then it will matter, and then I’ll deal with it, and then it will be over.
I go back inside. The apartment looks the same as it did before the man came. The light from the window. The books I never finished reading. The clothes in a pile that might be clean or dirty, I forget which. None of these things are mine, exactly. They’re just things I’ve been near. Things I’ve used. I could leave them all and it would be the same as taking them.
I sit on the floor in the rectangle of light and think about what the man wants. He wants paper. Paper with numbers on it. The paper represents something else—time I spent doing things I didn’t want to do, exchanged for the paper, exchanged for the right to be in this room. It’s a complicated system. People believe in it very strongly.
I don’t have the paper. I stopped going to the place where they gave me paper because I stopped wanting to go. It was that simple—the wanting stopped, so the going stopped. I didn’t think about what would happen next. I never do.
Outside, someone walks by talking on a phone. A fragment of conversation floats through the window: “—told her I wasn’t going to—” Then gone. Everyone is telling everyone else things. Everyone is negotiating their position in the system. Everyone is so busy maintaining.
I could find more paper. There are places that will give you paper if you do things. I’ve done it before. I could do it again. The sequence is clear: find a place, do things, get paper, give paper to the man, stay in the apartment.
But.
The apartment is just walls. The light will come through other windows. The crack I’m fond of will still be here, being a crack, whether I’m here to look at it or not.
I lie down on the floor. The wood is smooth and cool against my back. I look at the ceiling and think about all the rooms I’ve been in. All the walls I’ve left behind. The cities, the apartments, the borrowed beds and temporary spaces. None of them kept me. None of them were supposed to.
Maybe I’ll find the paper. Maybe I won’t. Friday will come and I’ll know more then.
For now: the floor. The light. The sound of the city outside the window. The particular quality of this afternoon, which will never happen again, which is happening right now.
I close my eyes and let the afternoon happen.
Gary has been a landlord for eighteen years. He’s seen everything. Hoarders. Drug dens. Couples who fight so loud the neighbors call the cops. Kids who throw parties that destroy the walls. Old people who die alone and aren’t found for weeks.
He’s never seen anything like this one.
The unit is spotless—that’s the first thing. No damage. No mess. No weird smells. Just... sparse. Empty, almost. Like no one really lives there, even though someone clearly does. A pile of clothes. Some fruit on the counter. Books stacked in no particular order. And that’s it. That’s everything.
Gary had been ready for a fight. Three months behind on rent, no response to calls or letters, the kind of situation that usually means drugs or mental illness or both. He’d practiced his speech in the car, worked himself up to the righteous anger he needed to get through it.
Then the door opened.
Those eyes. Gary can’t stop thinking about those eyes. Not hostile. Not scared. Not defiant or apologetic or any of the things people’s eyes are when you come to kick them out. Just... present. Looking at him like he was an interesting animal. Like his anger was a thunderstorm passing through, worth watching but not worth worrying about.
“I don’t know,” the tenant had said. That’s what gets Gary. Not “I’ll get you the money” or “give me more time” or “fuck you, sue me.” Just “I don’t know.”
Who says that?
Back at his office, Gary pulls up the file. The tenant’s name is there, but it means nothing—Gary’s forgotten it already. The application from two years ago. Employment at some data entry company—he calls them and they say the person stopped showing up months ago. References: a number that’s disconnected, an email that bounces. Emergency contact: blank.
It’s like the person came out of nowhere and will go back to nowhere when this is done.
Gary’s wife asks him what’s wrong at dinner. He doesn’t know how to explain it. He did his job. He delivered the notice. Friday he’ll change the locks, like he’s done a hundred times before.
But.
The way the tenant stood there in the doorway, like none of it mattered. Not resigned, not defeated—just not engaged. Like Gary was speaking a language that didn’t reach them. Like money and leases and evictions were things that happened in a world they were only visiting.
“Some people,” his wife says. “Some people just don’t take responsibility.”
“Yeah,” Gary says. “That must be it.”
But it’s not it. That’s not what’s bothering him.
What’s bothering him is that for a moment—just a moment—he wondered what it would be like. To stand in a doorway and not care. To have someone threaten your home and shrug like home is just a word. To say “I don’t know” and mean it completely.
Gary has a mortgage. He has a wife who wants to renovate the kitchen. He has two kids in college and a retirement fund that’s not big enough and a body that’s starting to fail in small ways that add up. He has a whole life built out of caring about things, carrying things, maintaining things.
The tenant has a pile of clothes and some fruit on the counter.
Who’s winning?
Gary shakes his head, pushes the thought away. Crazy thinking. The kind of thinking that leads nowhere good. You can’t just—you can’t just not care. The world doesn’t work that way. There are consequences. There are responsibilities.
He thinks about the tenant lying on the floor when he left. Not packing. Not panicking. Just lying there, looking at the ceiling.
Friday. Friday he’ll change the locks and it’ll be over. The tenant will go somewhere else, do whatever they do, be whatever they are. Gary will rent the unit to someone normal, someone who pays on time and complains about the water pressure and acts like a person is supposed to act.
It’ll be fine. Everything will be fine.
He watches TV until he falls asleep in his chair. He dreams about an empty room with perfect light coming through the window. In the dream, he lies down on the floor. It’s cool and smooth. He closes his eyes.
When he wakes up, the TV is showing an infomercial and his neck hurts and he can’t remember what the dream was about.
Just a feeling. Just a strange feeling of loss, like he almost found something and then it slipped away.
The place between the rocks. This body has slept here many times. The rocks make walls on two sides. The overhang makes roof. The ground is dry. The wind does not reach.
Coming back to it now. The sun low, the light gold and long. The body tired from walking. The place between the rocks is there, ahead, the familiar shape of it.
But.
Something different. A smell that is not the smell of this place. Bodies. Other bodies have been here. Are here.
This body slows. Stops. Looks.
In the place between the rocks—shapes. Sitting. Lying. Bodies that are not familiar. Bodies this body has not seen before. They have made a fire. The smoke rises. They have things spread on the ground—skins, bones, tools. They have taken the place.
One of them sees this body. Stands. Makes a sound. The others look. More stand.
They are bigger. Not all of them but most. Shoulders wider. Arms longer. Bodies that have eaten well. Bodies that could hurt this body if they chose.
One of them walks toward this body. The walk is not the walk of greeting. The walk is stiff. The arms away from the sides. The face tight. Showing teeth but not smiling. Showing teeth the other way—the way that means go away.
This body does not move.
The one walking gets closer. Stops. A distance between—too far to touch, close enough to smell. The smell of that body: smoke, meat, something sour. The smell of a body that is ready to fight.
Sounds come from that body. Loud. Sharp. Not words. Sounds that mean something anyway. Go. Leave. Not here. This is not for you.
Behind, the others are standing now. All of them. Watching. Some have things in their hands—sticks, stones. Ready.
This body looks at the one making sounds. Looks at the others behind. Looks at the place between the rocks where this body has slept so many times. The dry ground. The walls of stone. The overhang that keeps the rain off.
It is just a place.
The body that is making sounds steps closer. The sounds louder. The teeth more visible. An arm rises—pointing away. Go that way. Not here. Go.
This body’s heart beats faster. The muscles tight. The belly tight. The body ready to run or fight. The body does not know which yet. Waiting. Seeing what happens.
One of the others behind picks up a stone. Holds it. Watching this body. The meaning clear.
This body breathes.
Then this body turns. Walks away. Not fast. Not running. Just walking. Away from the place between the rocks. Away from the fire and the strange smells and the bodies showing teeth.
Behind, sounds. The others making sounds to each other. Then quiet. This body does not turn to look. The walking continues. Into the trees. Away.
The place between the rocks is behind now. Getting smaller. Then gone, hidden by trees.
This body walks.
The sun is lower. The gold light getting orange. Soon it will be dark. The body will need somewhere to sleep. Somewhere that is not the place between the rocks.
The legs keep moving. The ground passes under. Trees, stones, the small plants that grow in shade. The body does not think about where. The feet will find somewhere. The feet always find somewhere.
The tight feeling in the belly loosens as the walking goes on. The heart slows. The breathing slows. The place between the rocks is far behind now. The other bodies are there with their fire and their teeth. This body is here with the walking.
Places are just places. This body has slept many places. Will sleep many more. The place between the rocks was good. Dry. Sheltered. But there are other dry places. Other shelters. The world is large.
A stream. The body hears it before seeing it. Following the sound. Finding it—water moving over stones, catching the last light. The body kneels. Drinks. The water cold and good.
On the other side of the stream, a darkness. A hollow under a fallen tree. Leaves piled. It could work. Not as good as the rocks. But good enough.
The body crosses the stream. Stones slippery under feet. Getting to the other side. Going to the hollow. Looking in. Smelling. No other body has been here recently. The smell is only earth and old wood and leaves.
This body gathers more leaves. Piles them. Makes a bed. Lies down.
The sky through the branches. Going from orange to purple. The first star. Then more.
The body is tired. The walking, the tension of the other bodies, the leaving—all of it has used something up. The eyes close. The breathing slows.
Somewhere, the place between the rocks. The other bodies there with their fire. Eating. Talking. Sleeping in the dry place with the stone walls.
Here, this body. Under a fallen tree. Leaves for a bed. Stream nearby for water. Good enough. Good enough.
Sleep comes.
The body on the ground lies there. The sleep takes everything. No thoughts, no images, no dreaming or dreaming not felt or forgotten immediately. Just sleep. Just the body healing what walking hurt, resting what working tired, processing what eating gave.
The star turn slowly. The night gets colder. The body curls tighter without waking. The leaves hold some warmth.
The stream keeps moving. The water keeps making its sound.
Everything continues.
There is a person sick in a bed and I am sitting next to them.
I don’t remember exactly how this happened. Someone called. A different someone than the funeral someone. They said a name I recognized from somewhere, a long time ago, and they said the name was sick, very sick, and could I come. And I said yes, because yes was what came out of my mouth.
The sick person has a small apartment filled with plants. The plants are dying too—not enough water, not enough attention. I watered them before I sat down. The sick person watched me do this and said thank you in a voice like paper tearing.
“You don’t have to stay,” they say now.
“I know.”
“I mean it. You can go whenever you want.”
“I know.”
They close their eyes. Their breathing is wrong—too shallow, too fast. The body is working hard at something. Fighting or surrendering, I can’t tell. Maybe the body can’t tell either.
I’ve been here for—I don’t know. Hours. Days. Time moves differently in rooms where people are sick. The light changes and changes back. I sleep sometimes in the chair, waking when the person makes sounds, getting them water or medicine or just sitting there, being present, the way you’re present for weather.
They told me things about themselves, when they had more strength. Stories from a life I wasn’t part of. A marriage that ended. Children who visit sometimes. A career that once meant something. The stories didn’t need responses, so I didn’t give any. I just listened the way I listen to everything—letting it pass through.
“Are you afraid?” they ask now.
“Of what?”
“This. Death. Being near it.”
I think about this. The body in the bed is thin and gray and failing. The room smells like medicine and something underneath the medicine that the medicine can’t quite cover. This is the same stillness I saw at the funeral, approaching.
“No,” I say. “I don’t think so.”
“I am. I wasn’t before, but now I am.”
I don’t know what to say to this, so I take their hand. It’s cold and dry and the bones are too close to the surface. They look at me with something like surprise.
“You’re still here,” they say.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
The question doesn’t have an answer. Not a real one. Because I said yes on the phone. Because the plants needed water. Because the chair is comfortable and the light through the dying plants is interesting. Because someone should be here and I’m someone.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I’m just here.”
They laugh, or try to. It turns into coughing. I hold their hand through the coughing and when it stops they’re crying a little, though they might not know it. The tears just leak out, slow.
“I spent my whole life trying to figure out why,” they say. “Why do this job, why marry this person, why live in this city. Always asking why. And now there’s no more why left. Just this.”
“Just this.”
“It’s terrifying.”
“Is it?”
“Isn’t it?”
I look at their face, the tears, the fear. I think about what they’re afraid of. The not-knowing. The end of all the stories they told themselves. The approaching stillness.
“I don’t know what it feels like for you,” I say. “For me, there’s always been just this. One moment, then another. No why underneath.”
“That sounds lonely.”
“Does it?”
They study me, this strange dying person I barely know, who called me for reasons I’ll never understand. “Maybe not lonely. Maybe... quiet.”
“Yes. Quiet.”
We sit there. The light shifts. A plant drops a leaf. In the distance, cars move through streets, people go to jobs, the world keeps worlding.
“Will you stay?” they ask. “Until?”
I know what they mean. Until the stillness comes. Until the breathing stops and the body becomes an object.
“Yes,” I say.
They squeeze my hand, weak but real. “Thank you. I don’t know why you’re here but thank you.”
I squeeze back. I don’t say anything. There’s nothing to say. The room holds us both, the dying and the not-yet-dying, and time passes, and I stay.
Because I said I would.
Because the light is interesting.
Because this is where I am.
Ruth called every name in her phone. Systematic, the way she’s always been systematic. Starting with A and moving through.
Most didn’t answer. The ones who did had excuses—work, kids, distance. Fair enough. She isn’t close to anyone anymore. She let those threads drop years ago, too busy with the important things, the career things, the building-a-life things. Now the life is unbuilding itself and there’s no one to watch.
Except this one. This strange one. A person she barely remembers knowing, from some party decades ago, maybe, or a friend of a friend. The name was in her phone for reasons she can’t recall. She almost didn’t call it.
“Can you come?”
“Yes.”
No hesitation. No questions. Just yes.
Ruth has been sick for two years. The first year she fought—treatments, trials, the whole war. The second year she stopped fighting. The doctors speak carefully now, in soft voices, using words like “comfort” and “quality.” She knows what they mean. They mean she’s dying and there’s nothing to do but wait.
When the stranger arrived, Ruth thought maybe it was a mistake. The person just stood in the doorway, looking around, saying nothing. Then they saw the plants and started watering them.
“You don’t have to do that,” Ruth said.
“They’re thirsty.”
And that was it. The plants got watered. Then the person sat down in the chair next to Ruth’s bed and that’s where they’ve been ever since.
It’s been days now. Or maybe longer. Ruth loses track. Sometimes she wakes up and the stranger is asleep in the chair. Sometimes she wakes up and the stranger is looking out the window. Sometimes the stranger is looking at her, not with pity or fear, just looking.
It should be unnerving. Instead it’s the most peaceful thing Ruth has felt in months.
“Aren’t you uncomfortable?” she asked yesterday. Or the day before.
“No.”
“Don’t you have somewhere to be?”
“I’m here.”
“But don’t you have a life? A job? People waiting?”
The stranger thought about this, genuinely thought, in that way that makes Ruth feel like every question is being heard for the first time.
“No,” the stranger said finally. “Nothing waiting.”
Ruth doesn’t understand this person. She’s spent her whole life understanding people—reading them, managing them, predicting their moves. This one is illegible. There’s no agenda. No motive. No performance.
“What do you want?” Ruth asked once.
“Want?”
“From this. From being here. What are you getting out of it?”
The stranger looked at her with those strange calm eyes. “I don’t know. What am I supposed to want?”
Ruth had no answer.
She thinks about this now, drifting in and out of sleep. Her whole life has been about wanting. Wanting success, wanting respect, wanting to matter. The wanting drove everything—every decision, every sacrifice. And now the wanting is gone because there’s nothing left to want, and she’s lying in a bed watching her plants die and the only person who came is someone who wants nothing at all.
There’s a lesson there. She’s too tired to figure out what it is.
The stranger takes her hand. Cool fingers, gentle pressure. Ruth didn’t ask for this. She didn’t even know she wanted it until it happened.
“I’m scared,” she hears herself say.
“I know.”
“I don’t want to die alone.”
“You won’t.”
“Promise?”
“I’ll stay.”
Ruth feels something release—a knot she didn’t know she was carrying. This person means it. Not out of duty or guilt or the complicated debts that bind people together. They’ll stay because they said they would. Because there’s nowhere else they need to be. Because this is where they are.
It’s terrifying and beautiful at the same time. To be cared for by someone who doesn’t care. To be seen by someone who isn’t looking for anything. To matter to someone for whom mattering isn’t the point.
Ruth closes her eyes. The hand stays.
Tomorrow or the next day or the day after that, she’ll stop. The breathing will end. The body will become still. All those years of wanting will dissolve into nothing, like everything dissolves.
But for now: a hand holding hers. A presence in the chair. The sound of another person breathing in the same room.
For now: not alone.
That’s enough. It’s enough.
The other body cannot walk.
This body found it by the path—lying in leaves, leg bent wrong, face tight with something that makes the breath short and sharp. The other body made sounds when this body came near. Not the sounds of go away. The sounds of something else. Need.
Now this body sits near. The sun moves through the trees. The other body lies there with the leg bent wrong, breathing in the short sharp way.
The face of the other body is familiar. This body has seen it before. Around fires. At water. Passing on paths. The smell is familiar too—under the new smell of something wrong, the old smell of a body this body knows.
Water. The other body needs water. The mouth is dry—this body can see it, the cracked lips, the thick tongue. This body stands. Finds a thing that can hold water—a wide leaf, cupped in the hand. Goes to the stream nearby. Fills the leaf. Carries it back, walking slowly, watching the water shake but not spill.
Kneeling. Bringing the leaf to the other body’s mouth. The other body drinks. The water going in, the throat moving, the eyes closing with something that might be relief. The leaf empties. This body goes back to the stream. Fills it again. Brings it back.
This happens many times. The sun moves. The other body drinks when water comes. When water does not come, the other body lies there, breathing the short sharp way, sometimes making sounds.
The leg. This body looks at it. Bent in a place where legs do not bend. Swollen. The color dark. Touching it gently—the other body makes a loud sound, the face twisting, the hands pushing away. Do not touch there. The meaning clear.
So this body does not touch there. This body sits near. Brings water. Watches.
Food. The belly of this body begins to feel empty. The belly of the other body too, probably. This body stands. Looks around. There are plants nearby with roots that can be eaten. This body digs. Pulls them out. Brushes off the dirt. Brings them back.
The other body takes one. Bites. Chews slowly. Swallows. Takes another. The eating is slow and careful. The other body does not move much—the leg hurts when the body moves.
This body eats too. Sitting near. The roots are bitter but filling.
The sun gets lower. The light changes. The air cools.
The other body sleeps. Or something like sleep—the eyes closed, the breathing still short but slower. The face less tight.
This body sits. Watches. The light fading.
Why does this body stay?
The question does not come in words. It does not come at all. The body stays because the body stays. The other body is there, not able to walk, needing water, needing food. This body is here, able to walk, able to bring water, able to dig roots. So this body stays.
Night comes. The darkness filling in around the trees. The other body sleeps. This body lies down nearby—close enough to hear if sounds come, far enough to not touch the bad leg.
The stars. The sounds of night—insects, something moving in the trees, far off a call that might be owl or might be something else. The ground is hard. This body shifts. Finds a position. Sleeps.
Light. The gray before the sun.
The other body is awake. The eyes open. Looking at this body. The face different than yesterday—something changed in it. Less tight. Or tight in a different way. The breathing still short but shorter.
This body goes for water. Brings it. The other body drinks.
The day passes like the day before. Water. Roots. Sitting near. The other body sleeps and wakes and sleeps.
But something is different. The other body is weaker. This body can see it. The way the hand shakes trying to hold the leaf. The way the eyes close and take longer to open. The way the breathing is wrong in a new way—not just short but shallow, catching, like water in a blocked stream.
The leg is worse. The color darker. The swelling bigger. This body does not touch it. Does not need to touch it to know.
More water. The other body drinks less. More food. The other body does not eat.
The sun moves. The light changes. The other body lies very still now. The breathing strange—fast then slow then fast, not a pattern, not a rhythm. The eyes open sometimes but not seeing this body. Seeing something else or nothing.
This body sits. Watches. There is nothing else to do. The water waits in the leaf. The roots wait on the ground. But the other body is beyond water. Beyond roots.
The sun gets lower.
The other body’s breathing changes again. Slower. With gaps. Long gaps where no breath comes and this body waits and then breath comes and then wait again.
The gaps get longer.
Then a breath. A pause. Another breath. A longer pause.
Then no breath.
This body waits. The pause stretches. No breath comes.
This body touches the other body’s hand. Cold. Colder than before. The cold that was in the body on the ground by the others.
The breathing has stopped. The eyes are open but not seeing. The face loose, slack, not tight anymore. Not anything anymore.
This body sits there. The hand on the cold hand. The night coming in. The body that was breathing not breathing anymore.
Time passes. This body does not move. The dark comes. The stars come. The cold comes. This body stays.
Then, sometime in the night, this body stands. The legs stiff from sitting. The body stretches.
One more look at the shape on the ground. One more moment with the cold hand.
Then walking. Away. Into the dark. Toward wherever the feet go.
Behind, the body that was breathing. Not breathing anymore. The night taking it. The darkness covering it.
Ahead, somewhere, the living go. This body goes with them.
Ruth stopped breathing sometime before dawn. I was awake when it happened. One breath, then a longer pause, then nothing. The room got quieter, though it had already been quiet. A different kind of quiet now—final quiet, the quiet that doesn’t change.
I sat with her for a while. The hand I was holding got cold slowly, the warmth draining out like water from a cracked cup. Her face looked different without the effort of living in it. Smoother. Younger, almost. The struggle gone.
I didn’t know what to feel, so I didn’t feel anything particular. Sadness wasn’t there, not the way people describe it. Neither was relief or fear or any of the things the living feel when they’re close to the dead. Just presence. Just the fact of the room with its dying plants and its new stillness.
Eventually I called someone. A number Ruth had written on a piece of paper by the phone. Her daughter, I think. The voice that answered was groggy with sleep and then sharp with understanding. They said they’d come. They asked who I was.
“A friend,” I said, because it was simpler than the truth.
“Stay there. Don’t leave.”
But I did leave. Before the daughter came, before the noise of grief and logistics descended. I watered the plants one more time—the ones that weren’t dead yet—and I walked out into the morning.
The city was waking up. Coffee smells, car sounds, the particular energy of people dragging themselves toward another day. None of them knew Ruth had died. None of them would notice. The world absorbs death constantly, every second, and keeps going without pausing.
I walked to my apartment. Or the place that was my apartment. Friday has come and gone—I figured this out from a newspaper in a trash can. The locks will be changed. The plum pit on the windowsill belongs to whoever comes next.
This doesn’t bother me the way it’s supposed to. I stand outside the building looking up at the window that used to be mine and feel only curiosity. What will I do now? Where will I go? The questions are interesting, like puzzles, like the beginning of a walk where you don’t know the destination.
I have nothing. The clothes I’m wearing, which are the same clothes I put on however many days ago. No money. No plan. No home.
I start walking.
The city is good for walking. I’ve walked it for years, its streets and parks and hidden corners. I know where the food is thrown away still good enough to eat. I know where you can sleep without being bothered. I know the rhythms of the people who live outside the system of apartments and jobs, the ones who drift like I drift.
A woman on a corner recognizes me. I don’t know her name but I know her face—we’ve shared a bench before, shared silence, shared the particular solidarity of people who don’t explain themselves.
“Been a while,” she says.
“Yes.”
“You okay?”
I consider. Okay. The word people use when they want to know if you need something. I don’t need anything. Or I need everything, but there’s nothing specific that would fix it.
“I’m here,” I say.
She nods like this makes sense. Maybe it does, to her.
We sit together on the bench as the morning grows. She has coffee in a paper cup and she shares it with me. The coffee is bitter and barely warm but it tastes like being alive.
“Someone die?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Close?”
“I don’t know. Close to the end, maybe.”
She nods again. She doesn’t ask more. We watch people walk by, all of them going somewhere, all of them carrying their purposes like packages.
“I had a home once,” she says. “Funny how it stops mattering.”
“What matters instead?”
She thinks about this, sipping the last of the coffee. “This, I guess. Right now. The bench. The coffee. Talking to you.”
“Yes.”
“Sounds too simple when you say it.”
“Maybe it is simple.”
She laughs, a rough sound, full of years. “Maybe. Or maybe we’re both crazy and the people with the homes are right.”
“Maybe.”
We sit until the sun is fully up and the bench gets too warm. Then she goes her way and I go mine. No goodbye, really. Just a nod and a movement apart, like water splitting around a stone.
I walk. The city holds me the way it holds everyone—loosely, indifferently. I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know where I’ll sleep tonight. The questions drift through and out the other side.
Ruth is dead. The apartment is gone. The plum pit is lost.
And I’m still here, walking, breathing, moving through the morning.
That’s all there is.
That’s all there’s ever been.
Elena almost doesn’t recognize him.
It’s been months. She stopped looking at that window, stopped taking the route past his building, stopped letting herself think about him except late at night when thinking couldn’t be helped. She told herself she was over it. Whatever “it” was—obsession, infatuation, the strange pull of someone who seemed to exist outside all the rules she lived by.
But here he is.
Sitting on a bench in the park, thinner than before, wearing clothes that look like they’ve been slept in for days. Talking to a homeless woman like they’re old friends. Drinking from a paper cup.
Elena stops walking. She’s on her lunch break, forty-two minutes left, a salad waiting in her bag. She should keep going. She should keep going.
She doesn’t.
“Hey,” she says, standing in front of the bench.
He looks up. Those eyes—God, those eyes. The same. Exactly the same. Like nothing in the world could change them.
“Hey.”
“You’re—I went by your place. The landlord said—”
“Gone. Yes.”
“What happened?”
He considers this the way he considers everything, like the question is new, like language is a foreign thing he’s translating in real time. “I stopped paying. The locks changed. I wasn’t there.”
“Where were you?”
“Someone was dying. I stayed with them.”
Elena doesn’t know what to do with this. He says it so simply. Someone was dying. I stayed. Like that explains anything. Like that’s a reason to lose your apartment.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
“You’re homeless.”
“I don’t have a home right now, if that’s what you mean.”
“That’s what homeless means.”
He tilts his head, that gesture she remembers, that gesture that makes her feel like she’s said something fascinating and also completely beside the point. “I suppose it does.”
The woman on the bench is watching them. Elena feels judged, though the woman’s face shows nothing. She feels like an intruder in a world she doesn’t understand.
“You could—” She stops. What is she going to say? You could stay with me? They barely know each other. They slept together a few times. He didn’t even remember her name. “Is there anything you need?”
“Need?”
“Food. Money. A shower. Anything.”
He looks at her for a long moment. Then he smiles—a real smile, not the distant polite thing she remembers. “You’re kind.”
“I’m worried.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re sitting on a bench with no home and you look like you haven’t eaten in days and you’re asking me why I’m worried?”
“I ate this morning. Someone threw away a good bagel.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Is that bad? The bagel was fine. Still in the wrapper.”
Elena sits down on the bench. She doesn’t know why. Her lunch break is ticking away. The salad is getting warm. Nothing about this makes sense, but she sits down anyway.
“I don’t understand you,” she says.
“I know.”
“Does that bother you? That no one understands you?”
He thinks about this. Really thinks, the way she’s never seen anyone think—like the question deserves genuine consideration, like her understanding matters, even if he can’t give it to her.
“No,” he says finally. “I don’t understand myself most of the time. Why should anyone else?”
“That’s not—that’s not how people work.”
“Maybe not.”
The homeless woman gets up, nods at him, walks away. Elena and the strange man are alone on the bench. The park moves around them—joggers, dogs, children. Normal life doing its normal thing.
“I thought about you,” Elena says. She doesn’t know why she’s saying this. “After. I thought about you a lot.”
“I thought about you too. The color of your shoulder.”
She laughs before she can stop herself. “You said that before. What does that even mean?”
“It means I remember. The particular shade. The way the light hit it. That’s what I kept.”
“Most people remember conversations. Feelings. Moments.”
“I remember those too. But also the shoulder.”
Elena looks at him. The dirt under his fingernails. The hollows in his cheeks. The eyes that are still the same, will always be the same, no matter what happens to the rest of him.
“Do you want to come home with me?” she says. “Just—to shower. Eat something. Not from a trash can.”
He looks at her. She can see him considering it, weighing it, though she can’t imagine what weights he’s using.
“Okay,” he says.
They stand up. They walk together. Elena doesn’t know what she’s doing. She doesn’t know what will happen. She’s breaking every rule she set for herself about this person, this impossible person who exists outside all her categories.
But she keeps walking. Because he’s next to her. Because the day is beautiful. Because something about being near him makes the rules seem less important than they usually do.
Maybe that’s dangerous.
Maybe it’s something else.
Walking. The dark still here but getting less dark at the edge of the sky. The body moving through trees, over ground, toward nothing in particular. Just away. Away from where the other body lies not breathing.
The legs are tired. The walking has been long. But the body keeps walking because stopping feels wrong. Stopping means staying and staying means the shape on the ground and the cold hand and the eyes that do not see.
Walking.
The light grows. The trees become shapes, then colors, then individual—this bark, this branch, this leaf. The sky turns from gray to pink to gold. Birds begin.
A sound. Not birds. Something else. This body stops. Listens.
Water. But not just water. Voices. Bodies making sounds together. The sound of more than one, somewhere ahead, by the water.
The body moves toward the sound. Slowly. Carefully. Not knowing what bodies make those sounds. Not knowing if the sounds are safe.
Through trees. Through brush that scratches. Into a clearing.
A river. Wide. Moving slowly, catching the early light. And by the river—bodies. Many bodies. Sitting, standing, moving around a fire that is mostly smoke now in the morning. Children running between adults. The sounds of living together.
This body stands at the edge of the clearing. Watching.
One of the bodies by the river sees. Stands straighter. Looks back at this body.
A moment. The looking goes both ways. This body at the edge of trees. That body by the river. The others beginning to notice, turning, looking.
This body does not move.
The one who first saw takes a step forward. Then stops. The face is questioning but not hostile. The posture open, not tight. A hand rises—not waving away, not threatening. Just a hand raised. A greeting or a wait, I see you.
Others have stopped what they were doing. The children gone quiet, standing near the adults. Everyone looking at this body at the edge of trees.
This body takes a step forward. Into the clearing. Out of the shadows.
Nothing happens.
Another step. Another. Walking slowly toward the river. Toward the bodies. The smell of smoke and food and many bodies living together. A thick smell, rich, alive.
The one who first saw walks to meet this body. Stops when the distance between is small. Looks. Makes a sound—low, questioning. Where from? the sound asks, or something like that. What happened? the sound asks.
This body does not have sounds to answer. This body just stands there. Tired. The walking in the body. The cold hand in the body. The shape on the ground in the body. All of it there, not spoken, not speakable.
The other one looks. Sees something. The eyes reading what the sounds cannot say. The tiredness. The something-bad-happened.
A hand reaches out. Touches this body’s arm. Light. Warm. Alive.
This body breathes.
The other one makes another sound. Soft. Come. This way. Food. Rest. The meanings clear enough even without words.
Walking together toward the fire. The others moving aside, making space. Faces curious but not hostile. Eyes watching but not threatening.
Someone hands this body something—a piece of meat, still warm. This body takes it. Bites. The taste of fat and flesh and fire. The belly receiving. The body receiving.
Sitting now. Near the fire. The warmth on the face. Others sitting nearby, going back to what they were doing—talking, eating, tending children, the ordinary motions of living together.
This body sits and eats and lets the warmth come in.
Behind, somewhere far now, the other body lies in the woods. The one who could not walk. The one who stopped breathing. The birds will find it. Other things will find it. The ground will take it eventually. This is what happens. This is always what happens.
Here, by the river, the living continue. This body among them now. Sitting by their fire. Eating their food. Warm where the warmth reaches.
A child comes close. Small. Curious. Stands looking at this body, thumb in mouth. This body looks back. The child’s eyes wide and dark and full of the not-knowing-yet that children have. This body does nothing. Just looks back.
The child makes a sound. A question or a statement or just a sound. Then runs away, back to someone bigger, looking back over shoulder at this body.
The fire crackles. The river makes its sound. The voices of the others rise and fall around.
This body is here now. With these bodies. How long does not matter. Where next does not matter. Now is now. The fire is warm. The meat is good. The others are alive.
This body is alive with them.
The morning continues. The sun climbs. The smoke rises straight in the still air.
This body stays.
Elena’s apartment is full of things.
I stand in the middle of it, still wet from the shower, wearing clothes she gave me that smell like detergent and someone else’s life. The walls are covered with frames—photographs, prints, a calendar with notes written in the squares. The shelves hold books arranged by color. The kitchen has jars labeled with names of things inside them.
Everything has a place. Everything is organized according to a system I can feel but don’t understand.
“You can sit,” she says. “Anywhere. The couch, whatever.”
I sit on the couch. It’s soft, softer than I expected, and I sink into it. My body remembers comfort. It knows what this is. It relaxes without my permission.
Elena is in the kitchen, making sounds with pots and running water. Food sounds. She’s cooking something for me because she thinks I need to eat, and I do need to eat, and she’s right about that, even if the reasons underneath her rightness are different from anything I would think of myself.
“Do you like pasta?” she calls.
“Yes.”
“With red sauce or—you know what, I’m just going to make what I make. You’ll eat it or you won’t.”
“Okay.”
She appears in the doorway. Her face is doing something complicated—concern and frustration and something else, something that looks like fear.
“Are you all right? You’re just sitting there.”
“I’m sitting.”
“You’re not looking at anything. You’re not doing anything.”
“I’m looking at this.”
I gesture at the room. The frames. The books. The organized abundance of a life that believes in accumulation, in keeping, in the system of things.
“That’s—” She stops. Breathes. “That’s just stuff. Everyone has stuff.”
“Not everyone.”
“Well, most people. Normal people.”
I don’t say anything. Normal is a word I’ve never understood. It means something like “most” and something like “right” and people use it as both at once without noticing.
She goes back to the kitchen. I hear the sounds of cooking—the sizzle, the stir, the clatter of implements. Domestic sounds. Sounds that mean someone is making a home happen, moment by moment, through effort and attention.
The couch holds me. The clean clothes smell like flowers, artificial flowers, the idea of flowers captured in chemistry. My body is warm and fed enough and safe, and these are good things, these are the things bodies need, and I am grateful in the way I can be grateful—quietly, without knowing who to be grateful to.
She brings me a bowl. Pasta with red sauce, steam rising. I eat it because eating is what you do when food is there, and the food is good, warm and rich, made with attention.
“Thank you,” I say.
“You’re welcome.” She sits across from me, her own bowl in her lap. “I keep waiting for you to say something.”
“What should I say?”
“I don’t know. How you’re feeling. What happened to you. What you want.”
“I feel warm. I was somewhere, now I’m here. I don’t want anything.”
“Everyone wants something.”
“Do they?”
She stares at me. I eat more pasta. The clock on her wall ticks—an actual ticking clock, with hands that move. I watch the second hand sweep around and around.
“I tried to find you,” she says. “After. I went by your building. The landlord said you were being evicted. I thought maybe you were in trouble.”
“I was with someone who was dying.”
“You said that. Who was it?”
“Ruth. I don’t remember her last name. She called me because no one else came.”
“And you just... went? To sit with a stranger while they died?”
“She wasn’t a stranger after that.”
Elena puts down her bowl. She’s not eating. She’s watching me like I’m something she needs to figure out, a puzzle with pieces that don’t match any picture she’s seen.
“Who does that?” she says. “Who loses their apartment to sit with a dying stranger?”
“I did.”
“But why?”
The question again. Always the why. I’ve never understood why the why matters so much to people. Things happen. You do them. You don’t do them. The reasons underneath are stories you tell after, trying to make sense of the doing.
“She asked me to stay,” I say. “So I stayed. The apartment was just walls. She was a person.”
“Walls matter. Having a place to live matters.”
“Does it?”
She stands up, takes her bowl to the kitchen, comes back. She’s pacing now, short tight movements. The apartment feels smaller when she moves like that.
“You can stay here tonight,” she says. “On the couch. Tomorrow we’ll figure out something more permanent.”
“Okay.”
“I’m not—this isn’t because I want anything from you. I just can’t let you sleep outside when I have a couch.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Do you know what I’m saying?”
I look at her. She’s afraid—I can see it now. Afraid of me, or afraid of herself, or afraid of what it means that she brought me here. The fear makes her arms cross over her chest, protective.
“You’re being kind,” I say. “You don’t have to explain why.”
Something shifts in her face. The fear doesn’t go away but something else appears next to it—something softer.
“Just—eat your pasta,” she says.
I eat the pasta. She sits back down. The clock keeps ticking. Outside, the city goes on doing what cities do.
Tomorrow will have its own shape. Tonight is just tonight: pasta, a couch, a woman who doesn’t understand me but took me in anyway.
That’s enough.
Elena can’t sleep.
The faun—she doesn’t know what else to call him—is on her couch. She can hear him breathing from her bedroom, slow and even, already asleep within minutes of lying down. Like sleep is as easy as closing your eyes. Like there’s nothing in his mind keeping him awake.
She’s been lying in her own bed for two hours, staring at the ceiling.
What was she thinking?
She brings a homeless man into her apartment. A man she barely knows. A man who loses apartments because he decides to sit with dying strangers. A man who eats food from trash cans and thinks nothing of it.
Her mother would have a stroke. Her friends would stage an intervention. Her therapist—she doesn’t have a therapist, but if she did, they’d have questions.
And yet.
She gets up. She walks to the doorway of the living room and looks at him. The streetlight through the window makes a shape across the couch, across his body. He’s lying on his back, one arm flung out, face tilted toward the ceiling. Peaceful. Completely peaceful, in a way Elena has never felt in her life.
What must that be like?
To not worry about tomorrow. To not replay conversations in your head, checking for mistakes. To not lie awake at three in the morning wondering if you’re doing everything wrong.
She thinks about what he said. She asked me to stay. So I stayed. The apartment was just walls. Like it was obvious. Like attachment to things, to places, to the whole structure of adult life, was the strange position and his was the normal one.
Maybe he’s crazy. Maybe this is what mental illness looks like when it’s quiet and gentle instead of loud and frightening. Maybe she should call someone, report him, get him help.
But help with what?
He doesn’t seem unhappy. He seems the opposite of unhappy—serene in a way that makes her own constant anxiety feel like a fever, a disease she didn’t know she had.
“You’re watching me,” he says.
She jumps. His eyes are open, looking at her. No alarm, no defensiveness. Just observation.
“Sorry. I couldn’t sleep.”
“Neither could you, apparently.”
“I was asleep. I woke up when you moved.”
“I didn’t move.”
“You were going to.”
She doesn’t know what to say to this. He sits up, makes room on the couch. She shouldn’t. She should go back to her room, close the door, try again to sleep like a normal person with boundaries.
She sits down next to him.
The streetlight makes his face half-visible, half-shadow. She can smell her own detergent on him, the borrowed clothes still strange on his body. Up close, she can see the lines around his eyes, the evidence of weather, of sun, of time spent outside the controlled environments most people live in.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“I mean generally. With your life. With—everything.”
He considers this. She watches him consider it, that thoughtful tilt of the head.
“I don’t know what ‘okay generally’ means,” he says. “Right now I’m warm. I’m not hungry. There’s a roof. You’re here.”
“That’s a pretty low bar.”
“Is it?”
“Most people want more than that.”
“What do you want?”
The question lands differently in the dark, in the quiet. Elena finds herself actually thinking about it instead of giving the automatic answers. Career success. A partner. Maybe kids someday. All the things you’re supposed to want.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I thought I knew. But lately—”
She stops. She doesn’t talk about this with anyone. The creeping sense that her whole life is a list of things she was told to want. The suspicion that she’s never wanted anything for herself, only what wanting was supposed to look like.
“Lately what?” he asks.
“Lately I feel like I’m acting. Like everyone is acting. And no one talks about it because we’re all too scared to admit we don’t know what we’re doing.”
He nods. This doesn’t surprise him. Nothing surprises him.
“When I was young,” he says, “there was a day when I realized adults didn’t know anything. They pretended, but they were just as lost as I was. I found this terrifying for about a week. Then it was the most freeing thing I’d ever realized.”
“How is that freeing?”
“Because it meant no one had the right answer. It meant I could stop looking for the right answer. I could just—be here. Doing whatever I was doing. Like everyone else.”
“But most people still pretend.”
“Yes. They pretend to themselves. I stopped doing that. Or I couldn’t do it anymore. I’m not sure which.”
Elena leans back against the couch. Her shoulder touches his. She doesn’t move away.
“What happens tomorrow?” she asks.
“Tomorrow happens. Then we’ll know.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only answer there is.”
She should argue. She should push back. But the couch is soft and the night is quiet and his shoulder against hers is warm.
“Okay,” she says. “We’ll see.”
They sit there in the dark, not talking, watching the streetlight move across the floor. At some point, Elena falls asleep. When she wakes up, it’s morning, and she’s alone on the couch, and there’s coffee already made in the kitchen.
He’s sitting at her table, drinking from one of her mugs, looking out the window at nothing in particular.
“Good morning,” he says.
“Good morning,” she says.
And the day begins.
The place where the others sleep.
This body lies inside it. The smells are strange—many bodies, many breaths, the smoke of their fires, the things they eat, the skins they wear. Different from the smells this body knows. Not bad. Just different.
Around, the shapes of other bodies in the dark. The sounds of sleeping—breaths, snores, small sounds of movement. A child crying somewhere, then quiet. The crackle of embers where the fire burns low.
This body cannot sleep.
The eyes stay open in the dark. The body is tired—the walking, the days before, all of it heavy in the muscles. But the sleep does not come. The body lies there in the strange smells, among the strange breaths, and the sleep stays away.
Why?
The question has no answer. The body does not know why. The body only knows: tired but not sleeping. Eyes open in the dark. Mind—if that is what it is—moving without rest.
The shapes on the ground nearby. The one who greeted this body at the edge of the clearing. That one is close, sleeping, the breath slow and even. Warm. Alive. The warmth reaches across the small space between. This body feels it on the skin.
But even the warmth does not bring sleep.
This body turns. Shifts. Tries to find a position that will let the sleep in. The ground is soft here—softer than most places. Skins laid down, dried grass beneath. Good for sleeping. But not good enough, tonight, for this body.
The night sounds outside. Insects. The river moving. Something calling far off—an owl probably, or one of the night birds. The sounds are familiar even if the smells are not. The night is the same night everywhere. The stars the same stars.
This body looks up. The ceiling of this place—woven branches, covered with skins, letting no stars through. Different from sleeping under sky. The sky is there, just beyond, but not visible. Cut off. Something between this body and everything.
The one nearby makes a sound. Not a word. A murmur. Turns in sleep, coming closer. A hand lands on this body’s arm. Light, warm, accidental. The touch of a sleeping body moving toward warmth without knowing.
This body does not move the arm away. The hand stays there. Warm. The connection between this body and that body—small, light, just a hand on an arm, but there. Real.
Time passes. The embers glow dimmer. The breathing of the others continues. The hand stays on this body’s arm.
What is this? What is happening here, in this place, with these bodies, after everything?
The question is too big. The body cannot hold it. The body just lies there in the dark with the hand on its arm and the strange smells in its nose and the ceiling cutting off the stars.
Sometime—deep in the night, when the embers are almost dark—the sleep finally comes. Not decided. Not chosen. Just arrives, like dawn arrives, like rain arrives. The body stops being awake and starts being asleep. The thoughts that were not thoughts stop moving. The eyes that were open close.
Sleep.
The hand still on the arm. The warmth shared between bodies. The night holding all of it.
Light. Gray light coming through gaps in the woven ceiling.
This body wakes. The hand is not there anymore—the one nearby has moved in sleep, curled away, breathing still slow and even.
The others are still sleeping. Not all of them—somewhere, one is moving, adding wood to the fire, making small sounds. But most are still shapes in the gray light.
This body lies there. Looking at the ceiling. Feeling the body—the tiredness still there but different. Some of it rested. Some of it still heavy.
What happens now?
The question is not a question. The body will get up. The body will walk out of this sleeping place. The body will drink water, maybe eat, maybe sit by the fire with the others. The body will do what bodies do when they are with other bodies.
But.
Something is different. Being here. With them. In their sleeping place, their smells, their warmth. This body has been alone—walking, watching, lying under sky. Now this body is not alone. Now this body is among.
Does it fit? Does this body fit here, with these bodies, in this place?
The question has no answer. The body does not know. The body only knows: here is where it is. Now is when it is. The fitting or not fitting will happen or not happen. The body cannot decide it.
This body sits up. The others nearby stir but do not wake. The gray light getting lighter. The shapes becoming faces.
Standing. Slowly, quietly. Walking through the sleeping bodies toward the opening, toward outside. The cool air hitting the face. The sky visible again—gray and wide and open.
The fire outside is burning. The one who was adding wood looks up. Sees this body. Makes a small sound of greeting. This body makes a sound back—a copy, not quite the same, but close enough.
Sitting by the fire. Hands toward the warmth. The river making its sound. Birds beginning to call.
Inside, the others sleep. Outside, this body sits.
The day begins.
This body does not know how long it will stay here. Does not know where it will go next. Knows only this: the fire is warm, the sound of water is good, and when the others wake there will be sounds and motions of living together, and this body will be part of them.
For now.
For as long as now lasts.
Sometimes I walk at night when no one else is walking.
The city changes after midnight. The streets empty out. The lights stay on but they’re watching over nothing—storefronts and windows and the occasional car, but mostly just space. Space and silence and the particular quality of air when it’s not being breathed by crowds.
I’m alone tonight. Elena is in her apartment, sleeping or not sleeping. Marcus is somewhere doing whatever Marcus does. The woman from the bench is in her spot by the river. Everyone is somewhere, being someone, and I’m here, walking, being nothing in particular.
The moon is half-full. Or half-empty. I never understood why one is better than the other.
I think about the people I’ve known, the way you think about weather—observing, not regretting. Elena, who can’t decide if I’m a disaster or a doorway. Marcus, who wants to lie down but can’t. Sasha, who understood something that night and never needed me to explain. Ruth, who died while I held her hand. My cousin Naomi, who looked at me like I was a stranger wearing a familiar face.
All of them wanting something from me. Or wanting me to want something. Or wanting to understand why I don’t want what everyone wants.
I don’t know how to answer them. The wanting they describe is like a color I can’t see. I know it exists—I see the effects of it, the way they twist themselves into shapes, chasing satisfaction that moves away when they approach. But I don’t feel it. Or I feel something different. A kind of wanting that ends when the thing appears, that doesn’t reach past the present moment into future moments that haven’t happened yet.
The park at night is empty except for the animals. Raccoons, mostly. They watch me pass and don’t run. We understand each other, I think. We’re both just here, doing what we do, not asking for more.
I sit on a bench—a different bench, not the one from before—and look at the sky. The city lights wash out most of the stars but a few come through, persistent, burning millions of miles away. They don’t know I’m watching them. They don’t care. They’re just doing what stars do, which is exist until they stop.
I’ll stop eventually too. The body will wear out, the way Ruth’s body wore out, the way all bodies do. I don’t know when. I don’t think about it much. It’s hard to think about not-being when you’re busy being.
The night is cool but not cold. The bench is hard but not uncomfortable. A siren passes somewhere far away, rising and falling, then gone. Someone is in trouble. Someone is helping or failing to help. The story is happening, and I’m not in it, and that’s fine. I’m in my own story, which is just this: sitting, breathing, watching the stars that don’t care.
I think about what Elena said, about acting. Everyone acting, and no one admitting it. I don’t think she’s wrong. But I don’t think she’s right either. Maybe acting is just what living looks like from the outside. Maybe the people who seem most certain are just better at performing certainty. Maybe the whole thing is a dance that no one understands, and the ones who admit they’re dancing are freer than the ones who insist the steps are real.
I don’t know. I don’t need to know.
The moon moves. The night deepens. At some point I’ll get up and walk again, back to Elena’s apartment or somewhere else, it doesn’t matter which. For now I’m here.
That’s what I am. I’m the person who’s here. Wherever here is, that’s where I am. Not waiting for somewhere else to happen. Not wishing here was different. Just here.
It’s a small thing. But it’s the only thing I’ve ever had.
And it’s enough.
It’s always been enough.
Marcus sees her in the park again.
Three months since the last time. Three months of normal life—the metrics, the job, the apartment with nothing out of place. Three months of not lying in the grass.
But he never stopped thinking about it.
She’s sitting on a bench with a woman who looks professional, put-together, laptop-bag-and-sensible-heels type. They’re not talking. Just sitting. The professional woman is eating a sandwich; she—the one from before, the one who lay in the grass—is looking at the trees.
Marcus should keep walking. He’s on his lunch break. He has things to do.
He walks over.
“Hi,” he says. “I don’t know if you remember me.”
She looks up. Those eyes. He’d forgotten how they felt—like being seen and not-seen at the same time.
“You asked if I was okay,” she says. “In the grass.”
“Yeah. That was me.”
“I remember.”
The professional woman is watching them, curious. Marcus should introduce himself but he doesn’t know how to explain the connection. I found her lying in the park once and it changed something in me that I can’t change back.
“I’m Elena,” the woman says. “I’m—” She pauses. “We’re friends.”
“Marcus. I used to work with her.” He gestures at the bench. “Mind if I sit?”
They make room. The three of them sit there: the woman who left the job, the woman who clearly still has one, and Marcus, who has never left anything in his life.
“I think about that day a lot,” he says. He doesn’t know why he’s saying this. It just comes out. “You, lying in the grass. I wanted to lie down too.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I don’t know. I had things to do.”
“You still have things to do.”
“Yeah. I do. I always do.”
He looks at her. The same clothes from before—maybe the same actual clothes, threadbare now, too thin for the weather. No laptop bag. No sensible heels. Nothing that says “I have somewhere to be.”
“How do you do it?” he asks.
“Do what?”
“Not care. About the things everyone cares about.”
She considers this. The professional woman, Elena, is watching too, like she’s been waiting for someone else to ask this question.
“I don’t know that I don’t care,” she says finally. “I just care differently. Or about different things. Or—” She stops. “I don’t know how to explain it.”
“Try.”
“The grass was there. The sun was warm. Nothing was happening, and that was good. Why would I get up and go somewhere else? What was somewhere else going to give me that wasn’t already there?”
“But your life. Your job. Your—”
“Those are just words for things people do. I stopped doing some of them. The words stopped applying.”
Marcus feels it again—that desperate longing he felt three months ago. To lie down. To stop. To let all the things he carries just drop from his hands.
“I can’t do it,” he says. “I want to but I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because—” He gestures, helpless. “Everything. My job, my apartment, my family. If I just stopped, everything would fall apart.”
“Would it?”
“Yes. Obviously. Bills don’t pay themselves.”
“What happens if you don’t pay them?”
“Bad things. Debt collectors. Eviction. Homelessness.”
“I’m homeless right now,” she says. It’s not a complaint. Just a fact.
“And that’s—you’re okay with that?”
“I’m here. I’m alive. Elena feeds me sometimes.” She glances at the professional woman, something like a smile passing between them. “It’s not what I would have chosen if I was choosing. But I wasn’t choosing. I was just doing what made sense, and this is where that led.”
Marcus doesn’t know what to say. His whole life is built on choosing—making good choices, avoiding bad ones, building something that will last. And this person just... stopped. Stopped choosing. Stopped building. Stopped.
“I envy you,” he says. “I shouldn’t, but I do.”
“You could lie down right now,” she says. “The grass is still there.”
He looks at the grass. The sun is on it, warm and golden. He could. Right now. Just lie down. Just stop.
“I can’t,” he says.
“I know.”
She doesn’t say it with judgment. Just recognition. The recognition of someone who sees exactly who he is and doesn’t expect him to be different.
Marcus stands up. His lunch break is almost over. The world is waiting—the job, the metrics, the whole system that keeps him in place.
“Maybe someday,” he says.
“Maybe.”
He walks away. He doesn’t look back. He knows what he’d see: two women on a bench, one who escaped and one who might be starting to, sitting together in the sun.
At his desk, he stares at the screen and doesn’t type for a long time.
Maybe someday.
He doesn’t believe it. But he can’t stop thinking it.
The moon is bright.
This body walks. The others are sleeping—back there, by the river, in their place of skins and woven branches. This body is here, in the trees, walking in the moon-light.
Not leaving. Not going anywhere in particular. Just walking. The legs wanted to move. The body could not stay lying down. So the body walks.
The light is silver. Not the gold of sun, not the orange of fire. Silver. Everything it touches becomes strange—trees turned to bone-color, ground turned to ash-color, shadows turned to pools of black. A different world than day. The same world, but different.
The body moves through it.
Sounds are different at night too. Fewer birds—just the night ones, calling and answering in the distance. More of the small sounds: rustling in leaves, things moving that move when larger things sleep. The river still there, a steady sound behind everything.
This body is not the only thing awake.
Eyes in the dark. Catching the moonlight, flashing, then gone. Small bodies, probably. Things that hunt or hide at night. They see this body. This body sees them—the flash of eyes, the suggestion of shape, then nothing.
Not afraid. Not threatening. Just aware of each other, passing through the same night, doing what each body does.
A clearing opens. The moon bright in the center of it, bright as midday but cold. This body stops at the edge. Looks at the light.
Steps into it.
The moon on skin. Cool. The light touching the way sun touches but without the warmth. Standing in the middle of the clearing, in the middle of the light, turning slowly. Seeing the trees at the edge all silver and shadow. Seeing the sky, the moon itself, white and pocked and steady.
This is enough. Just this.
The body turns again. Stops. Looking at something.
Another body. At the far edge of the clearing. Standing in the shadows. Watching.
This body goes still. The muscles tighten, then loosen. The other body is not moving. Just standing. Just watching. The light does not reach far enough to show face or posture, only shape. A body shape. Still.
A moment.
Then the other body steps forward. Into the moon-light. The face becomes visible.
One of the others from the river. The one who greeted this body when it came. The one who touched this body’s arm in sleep. That one. Here. Now.
They stand in the moonlight. Two bodies. Space between. Neither moving.
The other makes a sound. Soft. A question maybe. What are you doing here? Or Why did you leave? Or something without words entirely—just a sound of noticing, of being present, of shared night.
This body makes a sound back. Also soft. I am here. I am walking. I do not know why.
Not words. But the sounds carry something. The sounds meet in the space between.
The other body moves closer. Slow. Not approaching the way threat approaches. Approaching the way water approaches shore—gradually, without pushing. Stopping at arm’s length.
The face in the moonlight. The eyes. Looking at this body. Seeing what?
This body does not know what the other sees. This body only knows what this body sees: eyes in the silver light, face half-shadowed, body close and warm in the cool night.
A hand rises. The other’s hand. Reaching toward this body’s face. Not touching yet. Hovering. Asking.
This body does not move. The hand completes its reach. Touches the cheek. Warm. The fingers gentle, tracing the edge of the bone, the line of the jaw. Learning the face through touch the way eyes learn it through seeing.
This body’s hand rises. Touches the other’s face. The same. Learning.
They stand there. Hands on faces. The moon above. The night around. The small sounds of things moving in the dark. Nothing else.
Then the hands drop. Not finished—no. But enough for now. The other makes another sound. Soft. Come back. The night is cold. The meaning clear.
This body looks at the moon. At the clearing. At the silver light on everything.
Then turns. Walks with the other. Back through the trees. Back toward the river and the fire and the sleeping bodies. Walking together. Not touching but close. The warmth of the other body next to this body.
The moon follows. Or stays—the moon is still, it is the bodies that move. The light comes through the trees in pieces, then not at all, then the orange glow of the fire ahead and the smell of smoke and the sound of sleeping breaths.
This body lies down. Near the other. The same place as before. The smells familiar now—or more familiar. Less strange.
The other lies down too. Close. The hand reaches across. Finds this body’s arm. Rests there.
This body closes its eyes.
Sleep comes. Easier this time. The hand warm on the arm. The breath of the other close. The night holding everything.
The afternoon is warm and I am lying in the grass.
Elena is next to me, not quite touching. Her breathing has slowed, matched to mine now or mine to hers, I can’t tell the difference. The sun is starting to lower, turning the light golden, making everything glow like something remembered instead of something happening.
I don’t know how long we’ve been here. The hours have been hours, nothing more. Time passed the way time passes—quietly, inevitably, without asking permission.
A bird lands on the grass near us. Small, brown, unremarkable. It hops a few times, looking for something. I watch it the way I watch everything—without wanting it to stay or go, just watching. It finds what it was looking for, or doesn’t, and flies away.
“What are you thinking about?” Elena asks.
“The bird.”
“What about it?”
“It was here. Now it’s not.”
She laughs, soft. She’s learning to find this amusing instead of frustrating. “You have the most literal mind of anyone I’ve ever met.”
“Is that bad?”
“No. It’s—I don’t know what it is. Different.”
Different. That word again. The word people use when they can’t decide if something is wrong or just unfamiliar. I’ve been different my whole life. I used to think that meant I was broken. Now I don’t think about it much at all.
The grass is soft beneath me. The earth is solid beneath the grass. Everything is held up by everything else, all the way down to wherever down stops. I feel my body as part of it—not separate, not special, just another thing being held up by other things.
There will be more days after this one. Days of walking and sitting and eating and sleeping. Days of Elena, maybe, or days alone. Days of people looking at me and trying to understand and not understanding and giving up. That’s fine. That’s how it’s always been.
I think about Ruth, dead now, becoming part of the earth. I think about Marcus, still sitting at his desk, still dreaming of grass. I think about Sasha, who understood something and kept it. I think about Naomi, my cousin, who looked at me like a ghost. I think about all the people who have passed through my life like weather, changing me and not changing me, leaving marks and not leaving marks.
They’re all still out there, being who they are. The world is full of them—people wanting, fearing, hoping, struggling. An infinite web of needs and satisfactions, all of it urgent to the ones inside it, all of it invisible from here.
From here there’s just this: grass, sky, sun, breath.
Elena rolls onto her side, facing me. “What happens now?”
“Now happens.”
“I mean—tomorrow. Next week. The future.”
“I don’t know. Does it matter?”
She thinks about this. Really thinks, the way I taught her without teaching, just by being the way I am and letting her watch.
“Maybe not,” she says. “Maybe it doesn’t matter.”
“It might matter. I don’t know. I just don’t know how to think about it.”
“Neither do I. Anymore.”
We look at each other. Two people lying in the grass, having given up different things to get here. She gave up a job, a plan, a whole structure of expectations. I gave up nothing because I never had it. We’re in the same place now, but we came from different directions.
The light is really beautiful. I want to say this but the words feel like too much, like they’d break something. So I just look at the light, the way it turns everything golden, and I know she’s looking too.
The afternoon fades. The evening begins. At some point we’ll get up. We’ll walk somewhere. We’ll eat something or we won’t. The night will come and then the day and then another night, on and on, until we stop.
But that’s later. That’s always later.
Right now there’s just this: the two of us, the grass, the sky slowly darkening at the edges, the first star appearing like a pinprick in the blue.
I close my eyes. The sounds of the park drift around us—distant traffic, children’s voices, a dog barking somewhere. The music of a world that keeps going regardless of who’s paying attention.
I don’t need it to mean anything. I don’t need to be going anywhere. I don’t need tomorrow to be better or different or more.
I just need this.
And here it is.
And here I am.
◊
Elena quits her job on a Tuesday.
She doesn’t plan it. She’s sitting in a meeting—quarterly projections, synergy, something about leveraging core competencies—and she looks around the table at all the faces nodding along, and she thinks: None of this is real.
Not the projections. Not the synergy. Not the people pretending to care about things no one actually cares about. It’s all performance. It’s always been performance. And she’s tired.
She walks out of the meeting. She walks to HR. She says the words that need to be said. They ask if she’s sure, if she wants to think about it, if something is wrong. She says yes, no, no. They process the paperwork. They wish her well.
She walks out of the building into the sunshine and she doesn’t know what to do with herself.
It’s been two months since she found him on the bench. Two months of watching someone live without a plan, without a trajectory, without any of the things she thought were necessary. Two months of realizing that the necessity was in her head—a story she’d been told so many times she forgot it was a story.
She walks to the park. He’s not there. He’s somewhere, being somewhere, the way he always is. She sits on their bench—she thinks of it as their bench now—and looks at the grass.
She could lie down.
The thought is terrifying and thrilling at the same time. Lie down in the grass in the middle of the day. Not sleeping. Not sick. Just lying down because the grass is there and the sun is warm and what else does a body need?
She lies down.
The grass is cool and slightly damp. The sky is very blue. A cloud moves slowly overhead, reshaping itself as it goes, becoming something and then something else. Elena watches it and feels the earth under her back, solid and indifferent, holding her up the way it holds everything up.
She doesn’t know what happens now.
The money will run out eventually. The apartment will go. The whole structure of her life will collapse like a building with its foundations removed. She should be terrified. She should be making plans.
Instead she watches the cloud.
It doesn’t care about her plans. It doesn’t care about quarterly projections or core competencies or any of the things that seemed so important three hours ago. It’s just water and air and light, doing what water and air and light do.
She lies there for an hour. Maybe longer. People walk by but she doesn’t look at them. She’s inside something now, a bubble of time that doesn’t connect to the time everyone else is in. She understands why he does this. Not intellectually—she understood intellectually before. But now she feels it.
The nothing of it. The everything of it. How they’re the same.
When she finally sits up, he’s there. Sitting on the bench, watching her, that expression on his face that she used to find unreadable but now recognizes as simple attention.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi.”
“I quit my job.”
“I know.”
“How do you know?”
“You’re lying in the grass in the middle of the day.”
She laughs. It comes out strange, half-sob, half-release. “What do I do now?”
“What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never not known. There was always the next thing. School, then college, then career. Always the next thing.”
“And now?”
“Now there’s just this.” She gestures at the grass, the sky, the park full of people who are all going somewhere. “This is terrifying.”
“Yes.”
“You’re not going to tell me it’s okay?”
“I don’t know if it’s okay. I don’t know what okay means. But you’re here. The grass is here. The sky is here. That’s something.”
Elena looks at him. This strange person who came into her life and broke something—or fixed something, she’s not sure which. This person who showed her that everything she thought was solid was just agreement, just shared pretending.
“I’m scared,” she says.
“I know.”
“But I also feel—” She searches for the word. “Free?”
“Maybe.”
“Is this what you feel? All the time?”
He thinks about this. Really thinks, the way he always does.
“I don’t think I feel free,” he says. “I think I just don’t feel the thing that makes freedom feel like freedom. The trap isn’t there, so the escape isn’t there either. It’s just—”
“This.”
“This.”
They sit together on the grass. The afternoon moves around them. Elena doesn’t know what happens next. She doesn’t know if she’s made the best decision of her life or destroyed everything.
But she’s here. The grass is here. The sky is here.
For the first time in as long as she can remember, that’s enough.
The grass is warm.
This body lies in it. Beside, the other body lies too. Near but not touching. The sun is lower now, going toward the edge of the sky. The light has turned gold. Everything it touches glows.
Above, the sky. Blue at the center, paler at the edges, beginning to show the colors that come before dark. A bird moves across it. Then another. Then nothing.
The day has been long. The walking, the finding of food, the time by the river, the many small things that fill a day. Now the day is ending. Now this body lies in the grass with the other body and the ending happens around them.
Breathing. The chest rises. Falls. The other’s chest rises. Falls. Not the same rhythm but close. Two bodies, two breaths, two hearts beating in the same warm air.
This body does not know how long it has been here. With the others by the river. Days. Many days. The days blur together—this fire, that food, this sleeping, that waking. The days do not separate themselves. They are one long day with darks in between.
It does not matter.
The grass moves when the wind comes. A soft sound. The stems bending. Then straight again. The wind passes.
The other body turns its head. Looks at this body. The eyes there. Open. Looking.
This body turns its head. Looks back. Two pairs of eyes. The space between small. The looking goes both ways.
No sounds. What would sounds say? Everything that could be said is in the looking. In the lying here. In the grass and the gold light and the breathing.
The other’s hand moves. Finds this body’s hand. Holds it. Warm. The fingers intertwined. The touching easy, no asking, no deciding. The bodies know. The bodies have known for some time.
The sky changes. The blue becoming less blue. The gold becoming orange. The first star appearing, small and bright, alone in the fading light.
This body closes its eyes. The warmth of the grass, the warmth of the hand, the warmth of the air. All of it touching the skin. All of it holding.
What is this?
The question does not need an answer. This is this. The grass and the hand and the light changing. The breathing and the beating of hearts. The day ending the way days end. The body lying here because the body wants to lie here.
The other body’s breath slows. Deepens. Sleep beginning, maybe. Or just the deepening that comes with rest. This body does not open eyes to check. The hand is still there. The warmth is still there. That is enough.
Sounds. Somewhere, the others are by the fire. Voices. The crack and hiss of wood burning. Children making the sounds children make. Living happening. It happens without this body needing to be part of it. It happens anyway.
Here is different. Here is quiet. Here is just these two bodies in the grass.
The light fades. The orange becomes purple. The star is brighter now. Others appear beside it.
This body’s eyes open. Looking up. The sky huge. The stars small but countless. The dark coming in but gently, the way water rises.
The other body’s breathing slow and even. Asleep now. The hand still holding. Even in sleep, holding.
This body breathes. The chest rises. Falls.
Everything that has happened is behind. The walking. The ones who were and are not now. The cold hands and the eyes that stopped seeing. The places slept and left. All of it behind, not lost, just behind. Part of this body. Carried without carrying.
Everything that will happen is ahead. The waking. The walking. The finding and losing that fill a life. The breathing that will one day stop. All of it ahead, not known, just ahead. Waiting.
Between them, now. Just this.
The grass under. The hand beside. The sky above.
The stars multiply as the dark deepens. The air cools. This body does not move to find warmth. The warmth is here—in the hand, in the body beside, in the grass that holds the day’s heat still.
Somewhere, an owl calls. Far off, the sound of the river. The fire crackles. A child laughs.
This body lies here.
The hand holds.
The stars turn, too slow to see but turning.
Everything continues.
This body, in all of it, part of all of it, separate from none of it.
Here.
Now.
This.
fin
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
Published by Centaurus Press · Universitas Scholarium · All rights reserved.