Every day, at about three in the afternoon Piaf's "La Vie en Rose" would play in the apartment across the courtyard. Until one day the woman who lived there just stopped playing it. I didn't know what the words in French meant but her quaking voice begged me to feel something.
I missed the playing, the predictability, the way it made me feel.
Sometimes I thought about the song, about the singer. Her face would pop up while I fed the cator stood in the rain or waited for the water in the shower to get warm. I looked up the translation. Once, while folding my boxers, Iasked the singer why she wrote the song. In black and white, she looked at me with big and tired eyes and said, Because someone had promised me it would be for always. And it wasn't. This way, in the song, it would be for always.
I eventually bought the single vinyl. As it played, I thought of a metaphysical life in shades of rose. I took down another wine glass and filled it with what was left in the bottle and walked across the courtyard. I rang thebell. I waited. There, with a sweaty glass of wine I waited and waited. But she never opened the door and said, I wondered if you'd noticed I stopped playing it. Come in. Thanks for the wine.
Another day I watched a man with a bouquet of flowers go into the apartment. And I imagined a universe devoid of abstractions. But it wasn't, isn't. And so the reason for windows. And so the reason for songs.