I had thought
I had thought that I would spend the stretch of the day watching the sun move across the sky, marveling at how the sky changed and how the sky changed time, how it gave me back time by letting me watch it happen. I would see the sun framed through tree branches, low atop the end of a narrow alley, and reflected in the windscreens of parked autos. As it wandered the skies I would find my way in an oblong loop back to my apartment, making amends with the empty faces of buildings on the sidewalks and the carpark courtyards that swallow the sun. I would stop at every window and buff it with my sleeve, wipe down every doorknob to every apartment in the route, and seal the city off in a clean corner to be buried by time and dust. I knew it would come. When was I concentrating on this. In bed, in the dim, without my body oddly visible from my own eyes, plans to fill the day are plausible. I thought about accidents, happening upon places that maybe I had been before to beautifully cancel out that lost past. I planned accidents. Maybe I would find myself at that beach. It would begin to rain. Something would begin to surface in me and I would fail to stay it. I didnt plan her, but I knew her. I have known since I came to be here that she would happen and change the idle things that block out time into something I look back upon. She wouldnt change things enough to make the day pass. Faces rising out of the endless sheets of paper and my face onto the desk were always the same face, her featureless face. In the mess of the papers that I could fold up and put in my pocket, her face was an intangible curiosity that I could produce to slow down the empty space of that place. It fit in between the cycles of the fluorescent light, it stopped me from seeing my body and where it was for a length of time I couldnt discern. But it was long enough, and then there was nothing else. It was an accident that she was real. She still must be.
