unto day

I saw you. I saw you, but you did not see me. I was driving around the bend on one of those no-place residential streets, and I saw you. Walking up the dark stairwell of an apartment building, your back to me. Disappearing up the concrete stairwell, half your body sunk in gun-metal gray shadow, phlegmatic, hands posed feather-like in your back-pockets, thumbs hooked out. Black t-shirt, black pants. Your thumbs, I saw them. I recognized them first, your thumbs: perfect. Those forearms, alabaster in the shadow. I almost crashed. So hypnotized, I was, I almost crashed. Almost, but did not. The moment ended. I continued on down the road, lifting my fingers to my mouth as if I’d bitten something sour. The thing I could not apprehend, and which I still cannot apprehend, is that I saw you, but you did not see me. I will remember this for the rest of my life, and you will remember nothing. That stairwell will haunt me. I will fight the urge to visit it, to linger on that ground. I am jealous of the stairwell. The concrete steps. The stale air. The wrought-iron banister. That they’ve witnessed you, unconsciously, is a torment. That they’ve felt your weight, communed with your breath. A torment.