I left the couch and paced the floor, then touched the windows. The walls were full of posters of dancers and company tours. Metro and I never got around to decorating our walls. They stayed bare and white.

“You want to talk about it?” said Rooms, following me with her eyes. I went back to the couch and took her hands, feeling the grains of her knuckles as I spoke.

I had signed the lease on the apartment on West 4th Street a few weeks before Metro and I finished college. It was a three-room walk-up close to the IND lines at 14th Street and 7th Avenue where the 1, 2, and 3 trains run. I had studied the subway map, memorized the numbers and color codes of the train routes. Metro had to visit his family and arrived in Manhattan two weeks after I moved in. He figured out the routes for the BMT, the IRT, and the IND, the bus lines and the shuttle system faster than I did. He had been to Paris where they have a better network, they say.

This was our first year living together. The rooms were small but had four windows and two exposures. I could watch the sun rise and set. Our bedroom was large enough for only the bed and a tiny desk where Metro wrote when he worked at home. “You couldn’t find anything larger?” he once asked.

“Nothing we could afford,” I said. My nerves danced as he fretted from one small room to the other, the kitchen-dining-living room, the bedroom-study, hall, bathroom, closet, and back again. Metro was always moving. He wouldn’t sit still, even to talk about moving from these rooms to somewhere else. Maybe he should have been the dancer and I the news reporter. But he had journalist’s eyes and wanted to take in everything, be everywhere. Just like that day at college when our eyes first met at Clarkson Hall. Now that he’s gone, I can’t help wondering what he really saw, or what I saw. All I remember is that our eyes were hungry.

That cold February morning made the sun stand still. I was up at dawn. It was February 21, the day we declared Malcolm X Day. Since the college wouldn’t cancel classes to memorialize Malcolm’s death, we black students would. From the top story of Clarkson Hall, the main building at Wesman University, hung a large bed sheet with the words “Malcolm, Malcolm” streaked in black spray paint, flapping against the frost. It was a sign of our presence at the university and a measure, so we thought, of our strength.