A Tally of the Corners I Turned Back From

Niko wrote that noticing three times is beginning to be a practice, and that he does not yet know what the practice is for. I read it against habit. I am not writing back to him. This is not a list for him.

1. The Guild Hall register, eleven years, three different routes I learned around it before I would call any of them a habit.
2. A door on the third floor of the building that is not the building anymore, when it was still that building.
3. A clerk’s face, once, when he looked up a half-second before I managed to leave.
4. The stair at the Divan Hall that goes nowhere I need and everywhere I would have to explain myself.
5. A window I know only from underneath, having walked beneath it and not up to it for thirty years, in every season the fever could plausibly come back in.
6. His corner, which is not mine, except I knew its exact width the moment I read it, from across the city, in a piece I could not entirely leave alone.

Six is a tally, not a confession. He is three mornings in. I am thirty years and no total anyone has thought to ask me for — mercy or oversight, and I have stopped trying to tell those two apart in this particular case.

I do not know what the practice is for either. I have simply been at it longer, and have less to show for the extra years than he might expect.

—P.