How long

How long would you stay in there at night, with the light on. It is visible from the street and the courtyard. Inside the apartment, with the lamps lit, the rooms are complete shells, the curtains become opaque, and the messy presence of the outdoors withdraws. You feel alternately secure and aware that although you have the shelter of the walls, the roof, the carpets and closets, control over the temperature, the illumination and the tone of the apartment, that you sit, above the street, introverted, surrounded, but oblivious. You are in a shell full of things. Things do not move. You float from spot to spot, touching the painted drips on the corner of a wall, kneeling with your head between your knees on the carpet, sitting upright in a spacious cold chair, the light illuminates discolourations in the wall, where old paint coats muddle through, you sit at the kitchen table folding napkins and at a low glass table lining up spherical transparent pills. Why should any occupation of time be any less than grave. Everything is ordered, in sequence, one after the next in time. Where are you in time. If you turn on enough lamps in the apartment the day will never come. How long is a night. What would fit in one that would not fit in all of them, over and again, slowed until it is no longer moving, with arms on the arms of a chair, you sit timelessly, counting back through the layers of paint, a night, another night, until you have unmade yourself. You stand up to pull the curtain slightly. It is still dark.