She comes and stands next to me

I am standing at the window. Condensation collects at the bottom edge of the windowpane. I see the river, see buildings where people live, doing things I can’t see but which I can with some justification assume that they are doing, after all I too live in a building and do things such as, for example, standing at the window. I don’t see anyone standing at any of the windows I can see, the sky is reflected in some of them, in others the concrete façade of an adjacent building, in others other windows. I am looking out of the window at a city that means everything to some people, a lot to many, nothing to none. I see a city, it’s the city I currently live in, and the desires, motives and actions of the other people, whose existence in my field of vision I can only infer, are as abstract and distant as the forces keeping Jupiter’s third moon in orbit. Like the condensation at the bottom of my windowpane, people gather in specific places for various reasons, clothed in differently tailored fabrics, with differently shaped pieces of rubber or leather to create a minimal distance between them and the celestial body they call home. All these people are surrounded by more or less the same mixture of gases, their skin receiving similar information about temperature and wind; in their stomachs similar substances are being dissolved, organic vegetable and animal matter. Many of them are feeling something, perhaps contentment, perhaps the hope of professional or personal success, of a fatty dinner, or sexual intercourse.

Then she comes and stands next to me and looks out of the window with me, and her smell and the smell of the cup of coffee in her hand are more real than the planet I am standing on. Her hand gently touches my hip and I feel the warmth and softness and plasticity of her body, as close to me as the laws of physics allow. The buildings and windows and the sky out there, the river, the streets, the bridges, the clouds, the helicopters, the people flying them, the subway trains beneath the earth’s surface and the ones on the bridges, the neighbourhood directly opposite, and the one left of that, and the one on the right, the one behind me on the other side of the drywall and the hallway and the apartment opposite and the people in it and their furniture, clothes, hobbies and political convictions, all these things I can think of while looking around me suddenly acquire infinite mass and break loose of their moorings in the abstract and begin to fall, fast, faster, along the invisible and inexplicable line we call reference. They fall out of my head and back into the world when she says: Beautiful city. We are standing at the window.