Morning autumn air rushes from the ground with a briskness that challenges the pace of the old man. With a mind of their own, his hands are forced from his pockets and up to his throat to rewind his scarf with a twist of his thin wrists. Teased, white, delicate hair dances across his worn, leathery brow and he brushes the strands back up into his grey knit driving cap. Tugging at the sleeves of his tailored tweed jacket, the old man’s previously mild expression deepens in what seems to be concentration. His eyes slit and shut out the world around him and, as if the universe knows he wants to be left in peace, he fades to become merely a dark silhouette dwarfed by the rising fire of the New Day’s Sun. He all but disappears from existence; only one thing keeps him from vanishing all together: the girl who watches him, sees him, from her window.
This is not just a one time occurrence, no, the unlikely pair meet everyday. Well, they always almost meet. What separates their lives? The pane of glass from behind which she observes him? Never. It’s more the delicate surface tension of their differences that keeps the girl from running out and asking him what she wishes she could. Why, why does he walk where he does? Where does he go and where has he been? Holding her breath, she remains content with the leaves that follow the man, twirling in his wake like the secret memories of his that she can never know. Would he, she has thought everyday, do the same as I? Watch and not interrupt? Would he even notice? Does anyone notice? Anyone besides me?
Too soon, the man is gone and with him, the girl’s isolated wonderings. Fret she does not, however, because she knows that come dawn, he will bring her new questions for the sky and the day could start again. Never had it occurred to her that there might come a time that she would not see him; for as long as she had woken up to her new life, he had been there, a dynamic, gangly puzzle piece, completing the picture of her early view.
But one morning, the old man did not grace her sidewalk and on that day, the sun did not rise. Knowing better too, the leaves did not twirl and the breeze did not blow. Instead everything was quiet, including the heart of the girl who waited as long as she could for her unaware confidant. Determined to put her hope in what had been, she resigned herself to wait another day to see him. All day long she contemplated his life and pondered, as she had a million times, what had brought him to her and how could she be the only one to know that their pair existed? More importantly, though, where had he gone?
She would continue to ask herself this every morning from that day on as the old man never appeared again. The leaves that had once been his memories now carried him in theirs and skip, skip, whirl-twirl, piece by piece of them broke apart down the concrete path he had trod. Their crumbled dust-bodies were scooped up by the fierce, howling wind which now spent the days lamenting its lost sparring partner who fought with nimble fingers and clothen knots.
And the sun turned cold and lost, missing the figure it cradled; the one that now only existed in the mind of the girl,
the girl that saw him.
