Before the Bag Went Between Them
The morning light moved slowly down the zipper of the bag. Cold air misted the surface of the leather. One strap had come loose and lay touching the floor. The handle held the deep grooves of several years. He picked up the bag to set it between the two of them, and stopped. To set it down would mean keeping a distance; to keep it at his side would mean staying close. There was no way he didn't know that. His fingers stayed on the strap, not moving.
There was a season when the cold air that settled into leather lingered unusually long. An old book on the bus stop bench lay rain-soaked, stuck to the backrest, and no one picked it up. The letters on its spine had bled in the water until they couldn't be read.
There must have been someone sitting on that bus stop bench, that season. Gazing at the rain-soaked spine while fingering the strap of their bag, perhaps in the end they picked the book up and set it on the seat beside them.
The bag strap is touching the floor. I was sitting at the end of that strap.
If you were sitting at the end of that strap, I wouldn't have been able to set my bag beside it; I'd have kept it on my knees.
I can almost see the fingers gripping the bag strap loosen a moment, then wind round again. Through that gap, the sunlight from the window lay long across the floor. The wish to keep a distance and the wish to be close overlap quietly on a single strap. While the curtain brushes in the wind, loosening and draping again, where will your bag be set down today? In the end, where he set the bag down, the sunlight moved very slowly.
Even after the sunlight had passed over the bag, the fingers wound round the strap stayed where they were. Only once the curtain had settled did he set the bag down, not on the floor, but on the seat beside him, a little closer.