The road

The heavily varnished wooden table that I am seated at is reflecting the overhead lighting back at my face.
I am by the window, inches from the street. But the door rarely opens. To begin with I am the only one there.  Of course there are the men behind the counters. The waiters. Because I have placed my order at the counter all I need to do is wait. I begin to examine the rubber plant  in front of me. I`m tired not in a morose way that sometimes does come over me but in the ligaments through which my body is bit by bit pieced together or undone. It is altogether comprehenisve right now. That is why I am tired. Because the only way to make it so is to work it up in the use of these ligaments- to press them into substance somehow in every turn and against that which I fall, slump down, bounce back up, re-emerge. Isn't it exhausting for everyone? Of course it is though I never ask. But we all know it, the passers-by against the window-pane. It is cold outside. They hustle by with flesh backs covered in garments, pushing carriages, carrying things. Slow, and measured. Un-stopping.

I see an interuption of light as something presses across the inside of a glass window up across on the other side of the road. It is way up high above the shop windows in the small residential spaces up above where the unsigned tops of the buildings have not changed for a century as the traffic roars down below. Roars and stops, roars and stops at the junction of the lights that pre-selects and sorts the traffic into bundles that move on every so often. Red and green, the spread of the city.

I see the woman. Actually I do not see anyone at first. Something presses and is gone, presses and is gone, removing and letting back in light as it does so in this dabbing motion. It is a cloth that is doing the dabbing but of course it is an arm that is pushing the cloth into position each time. It is squashing the cloth up against the shere surface of the glass that does not budge so that the cloth crowds in on itself  fold after fold meshing between glass and hand- the palm of the hand directly against the cloth.

In the upper most frame of the sash window a small figure appears. She wears a pink dress that ends just below the knees. She must be standing on a chair or something in order to reach up so far. Her feet disapear below the frame of the window where I suppose the chair is. Now the cloth is not restricted anymore and freely she moves it so that the woman lends her full impetus to each manoevere. She is behind the cloth, swivelling and adjusting her entire frame, leaning into it, driving the motion from behind whilst also meshing into it through her body.  The cloth is raised and lowered rapidly never leaving the glass. Then it goes back and forth. Her arm lifts high above her head. It draws an arc. Then there is a fixation on a single point. It is is honed in on. The motion locks into a rapid up down, side to side motion that then blends into a circular movement.  It is beginning to widen back out. Then it finishes. The cloth comes away form the glass. The woman looks out onto the road. Then her frame blurs as she moves away from the glass.

TheTurkish pizza arrives. I thank the waiter.Then put a cube of sugar in the black tea. It disolves and sinks into a small indent at the bottom of the glass.The sugar can't be tasted. I take a spoon and scoop the granules up from the bottom and stirr them back into the moving liquid.

A man stands outside the restaurent facing the door speaking on a cell-phone. He is hunched from the cold.
I eat the pizza with my hands. Then I go to the market. I am amongst all these people. It is effortless. I have the shopping to do.