Tuesday 4 Am

Photo: Logan White

I can see your feet. Even though you can't see me, i can see your feet through the bay windows, skipping on the green linoleum under florescent light. I'm two floors above you, but i can see your brown feet and the hem of your white dress.

It's 4 am and i wonder what you're still doing up. Me? I'm often up at this time. a couple of films, half a bottle of whisky, and i go to the window and smoke, my feet hanging over the ledge, enjoying the feel of the breeze and the gentle buzz and swoon of the booze through my body. my boozy body. Stained from the inside, and the outside a shoddy paint job of layered sweat, a new coat splashed on before the first one has dried. What are you doing up?

I can see your feet hanging off the edge of the bed. You're nothing to me. You are a series of images, fractured by the chestnut window frames, that, although i can't tell in this orange/midnight blue half light, i know from the afternoons are peeling and cracked by the seaside humidity. A horn comes off the ocean, loud and bellowing through the night, like a stuck bull through an amplifier.

I get sick of the fried smell, the burning buttered bread, and the coffee, that more and more in the mornings feels like a gritty medicine that i force down before it's cooled properly. I'm enjoying the ring stains the mugs and glasses leave on the furniture. I'm starting to accept the state i'm in.

If this was a different world we'd meet on the street, but yet you never seem to leave the house. When i'm here, you're there but you're not ususally up at this time. You're usually asleep, though sometimes i can see a pale llight screen flicker, this is the first time the lights have been on. I can see your feet and i wonder what's on the other end of them. Are there brown arms that hold a little brown baby in them, rocking it and singining it love songs, or just cooing unintelligably.

I fucking wonder.

I swirl the ice around in the glass, thinking about hurling it accross the street, wondering if it'll reach, or just explode impotently a floor above or below. I keep swirling the ice, looking down into the watery orange and thinking about the watery orange streetlights, and thinking about how easily whiskey goes down when there's ice in it. I finish the whisky and put the glass back down. YOu don't deserve that, but then again, i don't know you so i don't know what you deserve. Maybe you're a bitch. A murderous bitch. Maybe you're up at 4 am because you've just murdered your husband and kids. Maybe if i throw the glass you'll come for me next, or realise you've been sprung and come out and just before you leap the balcony and your head hits the bicycle rack twisting your neck horridly you'll look up at my pale legs dangling over the ledge, your cold hard eyes filled with unshed tears and i'll stare at you, without saying anything. Because you are nothing to me, just feet on green lineoleum on another night i could care less about.