The Apartment

Solitude is a room we enter to escape all others. Loneliness is the one we wake up in, alone, when everyone leaves.

Through closed eyes, I feel the tiny hands of the sun playing with the wind in the trees, and say to myself, “Wasn’t this enough the other day, when I swore I saw God?” Why is it then— (And this I don’t say out loud) Why is this moment failing me so? There was a time I thought this was enough. So I counted the sun, the leaves, and the birds, and placed them all in my pocket. Now in this moment, which comes for us all, one at a time, and is here for me now, I empty all my pockets and I see a sky bricked up and painted blue, paper birds glued to the ceiling and I think of time as it is for my mother— one long tunnel moving both forwards and backwards. Suddenly, I am again sleepwalking as on a heated afternoon sitting at the back of a rickshaw in a bazar, and wake up suddenly in all the din of the real and here. Or when I was ten and during a power cut I looked into the heart of a candle flame and had an epiphany that time would continue to pass without me if needed and woke up again with that thought on another day, 20 years later, like a twig that fell down the river once, still finds itself drifting every day, unable to stop. I think now of a life that seems like a lifetime away already. I think of my father watching TV in the other room, and my brother studying, and now following my mother to the kitchen, and my mother following him back and then stopping by my father, commenting on some ordinary thing or another. Perhaps the weather. Perhaps the grocery list. Perhaps a bill that needed to be paid. It feels like there was more of us to go around then. More annoyances too. More spaces to be cut into other spaces. More reasons to open and close our doors, and turn away our eyes and ears. The wind chime is the only sound here now and outside only the downtown sirens sing. Downstairs, a man plays the drums. Next door, a jingle of keys and some fumbling and a clearing of throat. Sometimes, I imagine these strange people across these walls, sharing the same air and water, and think of them as my many uncles, aunts, cousins. I guess, in a way, we are one big family here, in this apartment building.