As I Run
A brief piece about our final moment
She leads me out of her block, opening the door and letting me go through into the cold of morning. I step through — past her and her fragrance which could keep me there forever — onto the concrete stairway leading down to a bricked path in front of the block.
“Call a cab,” she says.
I do so.
“3 minutes,” I tell her.
She nods her head and steps out into the cold herself, closing the door behind her. She turns around, unable to face me as I’m leaving, and stares at her own reflection barely recognisable on the door’s windowpane. I now look at the sky, for her presence grips me into place, and staring at her further would turn me into one of the milliards of pebbles trekking across the stairway’s surface in random patterns. One round, three square. Two narrow, one large. A few by their lonesome, others in large groups.
The sky, as she would put it, shows neither hint of night nor day. It is stuck in a sort of limbo, or perhaps an existential crisis. It’s confused as to what colour to adorn. Should it bear the colour of a tumultuous sea, streaked scatterly in waves of white paint which we took as a challenge to name? Or maybe it should blaze up, burning itself into day, melting the stars and stitching itself a blanket of embered clouds. As of now, it accepts its fate. It wears both yet shows none.
A honk in the immediate distance wakes me up. I hug her, take her in, and then let go.
“Good night,” I say.
“Good morning,” she responds.
I smile and turn, running for the cab awaiting me. I glide down the steps and set foot onto the path. It’s bricked in two different colours. One white, a white worn down by her footsteps as she goes home, and mine as I leave. A sort of tainted innocence, this white. The other half of bricking is red, a dull crimson; dull affection, but it works, it works because there’s affection, there’s red. There is no particular pattern. The bricks are arranged differently each time you look; each change of mood, yet looking at them as I run towards the cab, as I run away, the colours melt into one another to form a vivid red, one flaring with everything it can spare.
Alongside the path, on both sides, a rusted fence stands tall against nature. Here and there it prides itself with its colour of black, long covered in most places by a lack of care. It reaches slightly below knee level, with a gap of around 10 centimetres between each bar, connected at the bottom, forming the shape of a U, leaving enough space for a foot to fit in between each rod so you can balance yourself when you’re bored.
Stealing the spotlight, two wooden benches flank the pathway, one on each side. Here is where it all happens. Where the small garden of roses to the left of the path is discussed, where we take refuge from weak downpours under a frail plume tree, where we contemplate how it makes no sense to have one set of stairs going down as you exit the block and then have another going up as you approach the main road. But now it can’t happen for I am running. I’m gliding up the stairs — railed on both sides by even more of the dull crimson — and onto the main road.
I get into the cab and close the door behind me. I look out the window and take it in; all of it. As I do so, I can’t help but worry that we’ll never meet again. Not her and I, nor I and everything else. I close my eyes and wave.
Till next time, whenever that may be.
