That night we went out on the rooftop. It was late and dark and empty. Since the last time I’d been up there somebody had put a blue gazebo covering what I liked to call “the lounge area”. But now it had partially collapsed – its legs bent in twisted angles – and was standing up by miracle. Pigeons would fly away with a turmoil of feathers at our passage. We sat down at the table and I looked up to the sky. A few stars were shining, and I could see red and white lights of airplanes floating around them.
After one song, G. started re-tuning his banjo and I tried to recall whether I had heard him doing it before. I couldn’t come up with an answer, somehow lost in those solitary notes that he tried to pair together again. Somehow, I too didn’t seem to be able pair things together. I didn’t have any particular thoughts and my mind was wandering between music, darkness and the street below, where people were acting as if day and night did not exist as two separate times of the day but would instead melt one into the other in the continuous flow of time.
After a while, I got up and went back past the crashed gazebo, down the stairs that lead to the attic and down again to the apartment, making the thin plastic wrapping an old mattress rustle as I passed by.
heimdimension 