on our building, there is a door on the terrace that opens into the stairwell. (when you climb up the stairs, it opens into the terrace, of course. that’s what happens when you try to imagine the scene from both ends.) it is seldom propped open; a few times i’ve noticed that the people working construction makes it stay open with a rebar or a broken piece of lumber. but today, just like most days, it was left ajar and it caught the wind, slammed into its frame with a loud sound, and bounced open again. i was sitting on one of the covered-up stumps of the load-bearing columns under the shade of the solar-energy panels when this happened. i was sitting there because i felt a little sickly, and everything, including the shirt, was making me irritated. this banging-closed—bounce-open routine was not new to me. i knew the door acted like this, and had seen it happen many, many times. the problem, however, was that today it had crept its way into my ears the way pieces of paper stick themselves under the doors of your room—incomplete, half-offering, tough to push out or pull in, and just unsightly.
then there was the building itself. not this one but the other, slowly growing taller and taller and covering this building under its shadows. the thing is, you see, the new building was under construction, and had a green sheet covering its walls beneath which i could see the silhouettes of the scaffolding and the glow-in-the-dark hi-viz vests and their hard hats. when the light was hitting it these silhouettes would vanish and the green covering would become sort of a big cinema screen full of shadows. today, on the screen, i saw a rock—well, the shadow of a rock—fall down. a rock falling from that height would make a lot of noise which would add to the irregular rhythm of the door banging shut, and that was something that would make things all the more weird and irritating. but as the shadow fell, i saw a bird take off from the top of the building, and i realized it was the shadow of the bird that appeared to me as a stone falling.
but of course, between the shadow’s appearance and the bird’s flight, there was enough pause that would make my heart beat a little harder, bracing myself for the THUDD to add to the THUD of the door.
if the world had fewer green-screens, and fewer doors with their own mind, then things would have been better. oh and the loneliness too; i could do with some less loneliness.