I see myself lying beside her.I see myself lying on top of her.I see how she parts her lips, then closes them again.

The sounds she makes—I cannot hear them. The half-light swallows her in an instant.

If we were walking side by side through the streets, in Vienna or Venice, I could hear that she is sitting beside me, that the silence—the one that followed the sequence of her rising, the rustle, the sweep, the brushing motion with which she piled up her hair and, in one swift movement, bound it into a wave about to crest—will not last long ,no longer than it takes to move from the edge of the bed to the window, where she pauses, gazing down at the street alive with night.

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