New Year

I went out walking in the evening. After tea, but before dessert. I left instructions with the maid to start a fire, and to retire to her own quarters after putting together the cake. She has grown so used to me that this sudden act of taking a walk after dinner seemed to her an act of aggression. It is these strange confirmations, the lifting of her eyebrows at this request which confirm how staid my life has become in these autumn years. 

"Do not look so surprised, Miss Thatcher," I told her gruffly. "I have not told you that I intend to run." 

She smiled and helped me into my overcoat, which is a shade too large now for my ever diminishing shoulders. The wind was whipping over the cobbles, hiding behind certain street corners and nipping at my cheeks. On evenings such as this it has been my habit to take a bit of alcohol, a minor bit, and then read over the news. 

The whole city seems changed at this time of night. When the streetlights loom like sentries, pooling light in alcoves amidst the coming dark. I turned down seventh street, passing by houses where people that I used to know had lived. It is strange to me how they can now be so emptied of meaning. I don't know if language is capable of capturing this particular absence. 

I came down the street and was struck by the sound of a piano being played expertly. I quickly, or as quickly as I am now capable moved out of the light and into the shadows, so I could hear the bars of music unobserved. Through a window I glimpsed a woman sitting at the piano, her brow slightly furrowed, as she worked over something by Beethoven. She had long red hair, cropped at her shoulders, framing her heart shaped face. And suddenly I was transported back to another time, years before, when I had stood at a similar window, looking out instead of in while a young woman played the piano. I remember the lights of the Christmas tree, making green and red patterns on the window. I turned from the window, watched the girl at the piano, wanting to say something to her about the patterns of the lights, the patterns of my thoughts, certain little pieces of verisimilitude that added up to something significant. "It is a fine piece," I said instead, and went back to gazing out the window. 

Years later now, it is hard to imagine that I was that boy in the window. And, as I listen to the music rise from the depths of the shadows, a thief as sure as any other. I thought that I should get back to Miss Thatcher. She'd be missing me on this night more than most. The awful reminder of the places we used to haunt, the people that we used to be. Of course, I realized as I straightened up and walked briskly through the cold that I'd never stood at a window against the frosted glass listening to a girl play piano. It was yet another thing I'd invented to pass these slowly moving days. And perhaps, in some other world, there was another version of me that was remembering that window, those red tresses, and perhaps these convergences in time happen for a reason, to remind us that not everything is lost to the passage of time. 

These are the foolish thoughts of an old man in need of tea. I think it is the last time that I'll walk after dark.