My friendships were mostly with people of a similar age, but all changed when the 85-year-old next left my letter listening to CD. My child is my son muttering in the garage. He wrapped the CD in a note written in his best hand, explaining that he thought he enjoyed the sound of his friend’s band, Colla.
Others in our streets had understood of the immense noise, that the sound, repelled by their walls, would creep into the quiet spaces, and ruin the days.
But neither is my neighbor. She delighted in him, sometimes standing outside our gargarization and hearing him break off into a bash for singing, as it were a private concert. Most days he walked the streets with his rescued hare that wobbled prey very thin to protect the pads under his feet.
Back then we lived on opposite sides of the same road. I converted it into an apartment in a workshop everywhere and hired myself in the village. When the farm was sold, I moved my kids and I into an apartment three doors down in the same factory and now, instead of sharing the street, we share a living room. She was the first person in the building to fall in love.
It is not here. The hit in the United States is on the way for several countries. Everywhere from Thailand to Ghana, Japan to the New South Wales Coast, picking up friends and picking up new addresses. An artist, he exhibited in galleries around the world, and many of the students he taught are now friends. Sharp and inquisitive, mischievous and inquisitive, he infuses conversations with a cheerful spirit.
We chatter in bits of conversation, going in and out at similar times building up. Sometimes our conversations find us meeting each other in a cafe or out of doors, often pausing until we finish a thought. Recently, we started sending wordy text messages and sending them, like a conversation that always picks up speed.
One day she tells me the cleansing of deathhowever strong She is pragmatic about her age and physical limitations, wanting to climb the ladder as she once did. We talk about aging and how it can be frustrating when your body doesn’t do what your mind wants it to do.
She uses my son to help her sell her products online. Inconvenience can often be with 16-year-old adults, but not with her. Perhaps ingenuity and honesty play the same from him. It is as if he knows exactly how to speak to her so that she feels that they are equal. He does the same with me.
While we are separated by many years, we share more than an email. We talk about music and misogyny, the fear of another Trump presidency, climate change, the Gaza genocide and how to install solar panels on the roof of our building. She is a fierce feminist, looking for and thinking about new things. Like many of the activists I see at the meeting, he is not young, and yet, despite knowing that environmental fate and global unrest do not touch it the way other generations would, he remains free, passionate and alive to the world in all ways. which there are not many.
And like any good friendship, our offer of borrowed books and home-cooked dinners grew, and sending them in the house and on the road and in endless communication.
Recently he knocked on my door to drop something or other and asked me in a low voice if I loved him. It was a nice direct question and I laughed. He already knew my story, that my partner had died four years ago, and that I was closed in pain and a single parent from him, but he clocked that something had changed.
Maybe it was because I was wearing lipstick again, or because I stopped wearing the same clothes from the floor, and those that had been sitting in my wardrobe were being pulled out to be revealed again. I, too, had begun swimming bay in winterand thrown into the depth of the sea by the cold, they gradually revive their horrible bodies. I told him I didn’t love him, but tentatively he started marking me, I put something in my reign when Aidan died. And he said to me that he saw all this in my face, my body, and I walked along the road through the hall.
We arranged an interview that needed more than the usual amount of time, so we met for coffee early in the morning. With a cup outside in the drawn-out shade, he asked the right questions and poured out honest answers, enjoying the story. Giggling we found stories of the past and the moments before us. As we talked, the years slipped away from us until we were just two friends laughing over coffee at six in the morning.