around

people ask, will you be around? i’ll be around. actually i like to walk around town and look inside people’s windows. things look so cozy in there with the lamp on and the bookshelf. you open a book to the middle and find the shape of someone you love, very fine droplets of water suspended in air. she calls you dear, as if that should prove you wrong. and you think, as always, deer in headlights, and say wait a minute, listen, i know what i am, i mean where i am. the couch, at least, is where it should be, jutting out from a wall like a risk into the center of the room, which you avoid at all costs usually, but sit down there now, hungover, flirting with absence. the noise loosens inside, turns to rain. you can see your wife cross herself as she steps outside this morning for the first time, in another city, and the windshield wipers waving hello to the roadkill in the margins, and goodbye.