After Reading

After reading one of Haruki Murakami's short stories, I stood there in my grey pants and night shirt, where his words had left me, waiting, and looking at the walls. The room that the story had left me in had a counter which would have made me think I was in a kitchen were it not that only a little further away there was a shower. I wasn't so much looking at the walls, as looking for them, for the places where the shadows flattened and formed silhouettes of the counter and the shower, and only recently held the pieces of the people that were just in here. The window is blinded, and the light from the outside is interrupted each time by a monorail train passing by as soon as I imagine it, or as soon as I am told to imagine it.

The couple, if they can be called that, were in here talking about airplanes. The woman was remarking how the younger man recited poetry about airplanes when he talked to himself unconsciously. She cried, this woman. Twice, the day she said that. This day. Once before making love, then after she had said to him that she thinks she is happy in her marriage. He was doubtful, but his own feelings for her had somehow progressed and flattened with the tiles of her house.

There was a bed in this room as well, I now recall. I looked at it right there, and I can't help but look at it right now, covered in a dark duvet, looking from near the counter. The two people never left this room, but they were no longer there after some time. Such as now. Now they are not there. I am there, standing, walking from the shower to the counter to the bed and back again to the counter, looking for strings on ceilings and the bold letters of another short story. There are walls, for walls make this a room, and walls allow there to be shadows and darkness, but I cannot see any that don't fade away when I move.

I stood there, where I am standing, angling away around this space, picking up a pen and a piece of paper with an airplane poem written upon it, and the leaving them to fade back into their place. When I looked at the counter the first time, they were there. Then I passed them by, and now I can see them there again. It is a matter of walking around the room, joining the shadows but casting no shadows of my own since this is not a story in which I am in.