The drizzle started falling as he made his way back home, but he was in no hurry to change his pace. It was a common occurrence here for the rain to fall more than once in a day. He had even witnessed the rain stopped and started again in the same half an hour. The rain helped to hide the sun from view and reduce the burn the star inflicted on the city’s surface. It was hot, and it was cold. It was dry, then it was wet. Such is the cycle in the city, predictable but random, a pattern perhaps carved by another to hide the layers within.
His clothes have soaked through when he was only three minutes away from where he lives. He still moves at the same pace as before. No need to hurry, he thought. He passed through pastel-colored concrete blocks until he saw his private landmark, half of a motorcycle helmet that remained untouched on the ground since the accident years back, before turning left.
For those who are not familiar, these drab grey blocks might look abandoned, empty of the inhabitants they were supposed to house. But should one listen closely, there are sounds of life, not all humans, but they’re there. He lives on the third floor at the last block on the row to his right. One minute left.
Is she back yet?
The thought hit him surprisingly late, considering he’s then just two blocks and two sets of stairs away from reaching his home. Well, their home. They had been living together for a bit too long, some might say, just enough for them to act as though they had known each other their whole lives.
They met five years ago, now he remembered, on a rainy dusk just like this. He did not remember exactly what led them to live together in a place like this, nor did they ever talk very much in these years ever since then. He thought of her just like anyone else with whom he had shared a rent payment before; another person with another life, who just happened to sleep across the room from him.
They were friends, surely, accompanying each other on the dull errands of life; going out to eat while waiting for the clothes to dry, driving around the city with a shared purpose of getting high, picking up and taking away each other from someplace back to their home. They were close, even. And for the first time in his life, his daily interactions are mostly with only one person. He admits that it was weird at first, only for it to be liberating later, since he now no longer has to live within the webs of political affiliations and social construct formed within any large group of people living together.
But then again, he never really does know her, never asks the questions a normal friend would ask, never cares about her daily foils. And neither did she. At first, he assumed that all the awkwardness was just signs of trying to be polite, which is partly true for his case. But as the time went on, he noticed that they only talked to each other about the same things and there was never any attempts, neither from him nor from her, to change things, to know each other more, to be more than…
As he walked up the first set of stairs, he hoped that she is back, for being alone in a dark apartment in an abandoned building during a rainy night might just make him kill himself later on.