This web page was written on 2-11-2001 at 3:50am Whilst drinking more black coffee and most assuredly NOT STALKING or SPYING on anyone.

DOING NOTHING: A STUDY OF APATHY

My window faces out over the square below, at the opposite side of which an identical block of flats looks back at me. The square is opening up, by that I mean that all of the shops and stalls are getting warmed up for business. It's mid summer, the days are long warm and lazy, and people seem in a mood to part with their cash.

I've been drinking, on and off, since last night. Absinthe, lager and black coffee and I'm not telling you what I mixed with which, but enough to say that I'm feeling happily muggy and warm. A crow sweeps across my view and lands on the lamppost below my window. I used to want to have one of those as a pet, until I realised how much it cost to keep them and how bad they smelt.

I don't have a girlfriend for the same reasons.

There's a  clock, just out of sight, that is the main feature of the square. It chimes seven and stops, no doubt listening to it's own echo. As if she were some beautifully crafted part of the device, the girl with the black hair walks out of the opposite block, across the square and sits on a bench next to a stall which sells sandwiches and mobile phone accessories.

She's entrancing. Not beautiful, physically anyway, nor is she some kind of sultry sex goddess or anything. But over the past year I have seen her break up with a dozen boyfriends, go through a tearful loss, a close friend or relative, her mother maybe, and I saw her brief flirtation with physical exercise which she gave up to get an extra half hour in bed. I don't know her name, but I know her rhythms and her cycles as well as I know my own. I feel a familiarity with her that is as close as any lover or confidante, and still I am a stranger.

Before you get the wrong impression, I'm not some kind of horrible stalker or obsessive artist type. She's not the only one I  watch. I watch all of the people that live around the square. The butcher whose wife is having an affair with some guy on a bike half her age, the young boy who steals crack from his junkie brother and sells it to his school friends each morning or the policeman that beats the crap out of his brother before taking cash off of him and demanding sex to keep him from turning on the young dealer.

No, I know all of these people intimately, I have watched every aspect of their melodramatic little lives, and still the only one that I would miss if they bricked up my window tomorrow, would be that girl. That, not quite innocent, not quite pretty  young woman with the black hair and the rare but pretty smile.

She's started smoking, and has come into more money, maybe a raise or the will of that woman that used to come around but doesn't any more. Her clothes are a touch more expensive, she has more pairs of shoes and her shopping bags have higher class names on them. Yes, the world is going well for her, and I am, of course glad.

I've often been tempted to go down and talk to her. To tell her that I've seen her and that I understand her pains, and her triumphs. Maybe not actually say any of that. Maybe I'd just say hi and buy her a coffee and lunch in the cafe in my block. I'm not sure what she eats in there, I've never been in at the same time you see. But she likes donuts. Which I'm guessing led to the jogging. Ultimately though there has always been something that needed doing or I didn't feel confident enough to go and talk to her. But I don't care really. She's here for me every morning and every evening, and she rarely closes her curtains.

I watch her read for a few minutes, waiting for the bus into town and drinking coffee from a plastic cup. She's been trying to get her head around that book, not sure what it is at this distance, for a couple of weeks, and she's finding it tough work. I wish I knew which book it is, but I don't use the telescope after sunrise, and besides, helping her would require talking to her. The clock chimes the quarter hour and she marks her page, gets up and leaves for the bus stop. I wait until she is out of sight and then I turn back to the computer. Still, nothing comes to mind for the next poem and the coffee is starting to lose the battle. I retire to my bed where I can close my observant eyes.

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