I don't know how long I’ve been here, still, only that I am, and that must be enough for now. 

Time is the world’s colorless blood, a hemorrhage of everything grown and lost, and tonight I’m doused. The clock rusting on that beige wall is an honest consolidation of that as it points to two past midnight, and I’m firmly certain I heard a knock softer than a breath on the glass doors to the balcony where I am fixed, watching. 

I shouldn’t be so sure when there is nothing looking back except that lonesome, time-worn chair on the other side. I’m perpetually motionless because everyone who lives here is asleep. There is nothing left for me but to watch that chair, in spite of the trying fact that there is not much to see. 

The chair is an insignificant structure of wood, rimmed with black, faultlessly mantled to be useful, a shape of the human need for rest, maybe. All it can ever do is wait on life, unworthy even of memory. 

In this dark, its rich mahogany color won’t show, but I know it’s there. I swear. In this dark, ravenous and all-encompassing, I forget what is alive and what is not. The knock. Right. When did that happen? 

Time is a murderer of memory and dreams. All I know is that it was a sound almost silent. There is no sensical reason as to why the chair would make a sound, if only to cut through this deafening silence. It couldn’t have moved anyway, could it? 

I try shifting closer to the glass— I try. The chair is but a sleepless, dreamless, voiceless thing. Still, it must be exhausted from the cold, forsaken, forgone, only until it is needed, remembered for use. 

I won’t move from this square of space, from this unmoving picture of perspective. Not until I’m moved, that is. Not until there is meaning. Suspended in this moment, isolated, I am the one witness to its possible sorrows, to its wordless askings, to its weathered frames; here, now, we are outcasts of the same life. 

It is said everything is a byproduct of stars dying; so tonight, the dent in its wood is a crater on the moon, and it could have been magnificent— deathly beautiful— if seen by a gentle eye. 

Looking out into the pitch-black, I think I want to reach out a gaunt limb to touch or hold anything, even the hollowed-out nothingness of this space, just to see if I can, even when I know the answer. 

Can something so lifeless once have been so bright?

You know, in such a dim light, the glass is a mirror, and the imagined sound is a testament to an attempt at life. 

The chair on the other side of the glass is a reflection of my blacked out silhouette. I do not know what to make of it but a morose misfortune, a god’s endeavor of a prison in jest of me. 

I do not watch myself often, only those around me in life, and it is so lonely out here. Come daylight, she’ll drag me out by the top of my frame to the harrowing cold to sit and breathe in what I cannot, the thrum of blood in her veins a river of life I am not part of. Maybe there’s no use in wasting time wondering about anything, hoping. I can’t even feel the cold, though I wish I could feel the warmth of the rising sun suffusing the world in gold as if even I could be remembered.