Near the couple there was a burnt chair: garbage, darkened wood, charred remnants. That’s what had attracted my attention while leaving the building, the medical building, with the activated charcoal in my teeth—an abandoned chair all broken at the hips.

I imagined the impulse of someone purchasing a new chair, deciding to throw this old one away—picking it up with their knees bent and their lower back engaged, a contraction in the abdomen, separating it from their other possessions, and this object (made only for laziness or rest or gathering) being moved down a flight of wooden steps, being carried and offered to this sidewalk, sloppily, an old chair left to perish, and I imagined too the person who might have burned it, probably a man (men expect things to have violent ends) with a lighter or a match and the smell of cigarette on his thumbs.

The dead chair was near the unmoving couple.

There was a balance there I found significant, so I looked back and forth between them for six minutes, or seven. I knew the couple must have liked one another. They stared like children and kissed on the corners of their lips, and I knew.

If I followed the couple home it was because of her hair.

The building they entered was severe: red brick, steel, iron, and glass. Ugly. I waited to see what would become of them, now that they were inside a familiar place.

Time passed and it began to rain. I thought of the burned chair sitting outside the medical building, the consequence of this location, its wooden frame peeling.

When the light turned on in the fourth window from the right, on the second floor, I felt relief. I became aroused. There was sweat, sweat on my nose, and my bowels were ready. There was water—the rain that was still coming down and the sweat that was still coming.

We were a triangle.

In the fourth window from the right, I saw pieces of them: the corner of a yellow painting, a bookcase filled to the brim, the light fixture, the tip of a houseplant’s leaf, a purple sofa, the blue walls, and then finally, finally her face in the window, her hair, her closed eyes, his hand wrapped around her neck like a scarf.

Hers was a plain face, really, as unremarkable as a piece of furniture. A face marked with freckles.

She had the most average of lips, the dark right eyebrow, and the left just as dark, long eyelashes, a nose with a bump in the middle as if it had been broken in childhood, the freckles covering her cheekbones like sand, and her resting eyelids.

I couldn’t see her eyes.

So I waited to see how long she would stay, unsmiling. The rain fell hard on my hands.

Her skin, her hair had distracted me.