You can Hear the Stare Hit the Wall

Here’s this old house you moved into last July. The second floor room overlooking the street – you tidied it yourself. Your nest, for better or worse. The neighbours are fine. Two little animals live on the roof. They run to and fro all night like wild cats or like horses galloping overhead. Next door the old drunkard locks himself in and sighs. Sometimes he comes across you on the stairs, brushes past you, his eyes staring vacantly. You can hear the stare hit the wall, break up, and shatter on the floor. You’ve lived here long enough but still don’t know each other’s names. Behind the thin wooden wall he curses in a foreign language. And you curse in another foreign language. You guess this is how dead soldiers converse. Dead soldiers from foreign countries, lying side by side in great heaps. On the other side of the thin wooden wall is your foreign country. Another star over there, nothing to do with you. A pair of madmen. So long as you go mad under separate roofs the world is safe.

Yang Lian