A stop at the end of June, ten in the evening.
I hear them before I see them.
Two male voices, that particular tone of men discussing something important out of doors, at the hour when the city cools and conversation becomes wider than the day has permitted. One of them is gesticulating — I can see him now, they have reached a street lamp — his right hand tracing something in the air, an arc, perhaps the route of a bus, perhaps the surface of a solar panel, perhaps simply the magnitude of a number.
Sixty-four, I hear distinctly.
Sixty-four electric buses. This is the project. I have heard it mentioned before — in local news, in the council's Facebook posts, in the queue at the chemist's. A European project, non-reimbursable funds, charging infrastructure, real-time information panels, emissions reduction, complete modernisation of urban transport. The figures are large and round and luminous. Sixty-four.
The two men have stopped exactly beside the shelter, two metres from the concrete plinth with its cable wrapped in black insulating tape. They do not see it, or if they see it, they do not look at it. They look at each other and talk about the future, which in their imagination is already the present: silent buses gliding through streets, passengers with the app on their phones knowing to the second when the next service comes, cleaner air, a more vibrant city.
One of them — the one gesticulating — is a man of perhaps fifty, jacket thrown over his shoulder in the evening heat, tie loosened. He speaks with the conviction of someone who has read the documents, who may even have attended a meeting. The other listens, agrees, asks short questions. Both smile slightly, with the smile of people sharing good news.
It is not bad news.
The project exists. The funds are real. Sixty-four electric buses is not a promise invented on Facebook; it is a council resolution, a signed contract, an accepted deadline. The residents who have seen the renderings have seen something that will exist, not something imaginary. The difference from other promises is that this one has a file number.
And more than that: it has a beginning. Concrete. Visible.
The two men with sixty-four buses between them leave shortly — one to the right, one to the left — and the street is left with what it was before they arrived.
I am standing. I do not know for how long.
The asphalt breathes. There is no other way to say it. The day has spent itself entirely — nine hours of sun on the pavement, on the bodywork of parked cars, on the sheet-metal rooftops of the blocks along the side street — and now, at ten in the evening, the heat does not leave but merely changes its nature. It rises from below rather than falling from above. You feel it through the soles of your shoes. The air sits dense and still, thick with the particular humidity of end-of-June in this part of the country: not cool, not warm, but something inert, something that presses against the skin like a damp cloth left in a closed room. The smell is of warm dust and something vegetal, scorched grass somewhere nearby, and beneath it, faint, the diesel of a bus that passed earlier.
The stop is a shelter under construction, installed a month ago, unfinished. Heavy sheet metal, grey, fresh paint that has not yet yellowed. Fixed into a square of pavement at the edge of a secondary street. It has no walls — only the roof, supported on two posts, open on both sides to the June evening like a half-kept promise. The metal does not let light through. It offers shade by day and protection from rain, and nothing more.
And yet, it must be said: it exists. That is not a small thing on this street, in this city, in this summer.
Inside: a waiting bench, painted metal, still without scratches. On one of the posts, a display screen mounted at eye level — black, unlit, showing nothing, not flickering. It is not broken. Simply not yet connected. On the pavement beside the bench, a concrete plinth with a thick cable emerging from it, the end wrapped in black insulating tape, waiting for equipment that has not arrived. Probably a ticket machine. Perhaps something else. Nobody knows for certain, but everyone saw the sign on the hoarding last month: Station modernisation — completion date: July. July is eight days away.
And, unlike other signs on other hoardings in other years, this one has something palpable behind it: the structure is mounted, the plinth is poured, the cable is laid. Someone came with heavy equipment and dug and poured concrete and bolted sheet metal into place. Someone worked. This is visible. It is not a promise in the air — it is a promise half-materialised, waiting for its other half.
The sensation produced by all of this together — the grey metal, the dead screen, the waiting cable, the unscratched bench, the concrete plinth that exists — is approximately that of exhaustion. Not of ruin, not of abandonment, but of something more specific and more difficult to define: the waiting for something that has begun and that will be finished, but not today, and not tomorrow, and not with any certainty in eight days. The residents of this street have seen the renderings on the council's Facebook page, in colour, with people smiling beside functioning ticket machines and LED panels showing real-time timetables, and they have also seen the structure go up, have seen that it is not merely an image, and now they stand under sheet metal and look at the cable wrapped in black tape and know that it will be fine, but do not know exactly when.
Above the shelter, the sky is already a deep cobalt pressing towards black at its centre, still lighter at the horizon where the last warmth of the day clings to the edge of the city.
Old man is eating
Ten metres to the left of the shelter, an old man is eating.
He is seated on the low concrete kerb of a green space — the flowers long since replaced by weeds, the soil cracked in long lines like palms left too long in the sun. He has a plastic bag between his feet, the cheap kind with red handles, and from it he extracts things with a methodical patience that belongs to a different calendar. A piece of bread. A parcel wrapped in aluminium foil, which he unwraps with the same care a father might use to open something fragile and beloved. Inside: something dark, meat perhaps, pressed flat. He eats slowly. He does not look up.
But he looked up once, when the children began to scream more loudly. An old reflex, a parent's reflex, a grandparent's reflex — not of worry, but of recognition. He looked towards the families for a few seconds, with an attention that was not curiosity but something deeper and quieter. Then he lowered his eyes back to his hands. Aluminium foil. Bread. The June evening.
Somewhere, a few hundred kilometres away or perhaps further, he has grandchildren of his own. Or he had them. Or he has them but does not see them often — not often enough, not this evening, not on this street. These children who scream and rattle toys and run and shove are not his, but their movements are familiar to him in the body, not in the mind. The body knows what a four-year-old dragging a toy looks like. The body has known this for a long time and does not forget.
The little girl with the wheeled toy passes close to him at one point, a metre away, and stops for a second and looks at him with wide eyes — that direct, unguarded gaze that very small children turn on very old men, a look that does not judge and does not flinch, that simply registers the presence of a human being with bread in his hand and foil glinting in the lamplight. He raises his eyes and meets hers. One second, perhaps two. Then the girl leaves, the toy clattering back towards her mother, and the old man holds his gaze for a moment on the place where the child was, before returning to his bread.
I do not know what he thought. I do not know whether he thought anything formulated in words. But I know that look lasted precisely as long as the recognition of something you have known for a long time and no longer have near.
Another old man
Ten metres to the right of the shelter, another old man is drinking beer.
He is standing, which is unusual, but he stands in the way very old men sometimes stand when sitting has become as much effort as standing: with his weight shifted entirely to one side, his left elbow on the low wall of the unfinished station, his right hand holding the bottle pressed against his chest like a small animal kept warm. The beer is in a brown glass bottle, half empty. He drinks from it occasionally, between intervals of stillness so absolute that for stretches of a minute or more he might be a figure in a painting, something from a municipal mural in a language nobody reads any more.
He watches the families with more attention than he shows. He does not turn his head visibly, does not move, but his eyes move slightly, following one child, then another, with the discreet method of a man who has learned to look without being caught looking. At one point, one of the older boys — the one involved in the shoving match — runs almost up to him, chased by the other, and they stop abruptly when they see him, as though they have hit an invisible wall. They look at him. He looks at them. The boys run back towards their families.
Something crosses his face then. Something quick, which if you are not watching you miss. Not a smile, not sadness, but something between the two, something for which there is no precise word in any language I know — the fleeting recognition of an energy you once had in your body and which now belongs to others, younger, further away.
His own are in Bucharest, perhaps. Or in Iași. Or in Italy, in Spain, in Germany — the places where an entire generation left these small cities, taking with them precisely that energy which the boys are now spending running along the pavement in front of an unfinished station. His grandchildren, if he has grandchildren, perhaps did not grow up on this street, perhaps do not know what the clatter of a wheeled toy sounds like on this specific pavement, on this specific evening at the end of June. Perhaps they send him messages on his phone on Sundays. Perhaps they do not.
His left elbow rests on the freshly grey metal of the promised station. Neither he nor the metal comments. Beneath his elbow lies a project of sixty-four electric buses, materialised for now in two posts and a roof.
Between the two old men, approximately equidistant, the two families have colonised the space in front of the shelter itself.
There are seven children between them, perhaps eight — it is difficult to count because they move. They move in the specific way that children move late at night when they should be asleep but are not: electric, slightly deranged, with a fixed intention that changes every twelve seconds. A girl of perhaps four is dragging a wheeled toy across the pavement, and the sound it makes — a rapid, hollow clatter, like a small machine going wrong — cuts through the warm air with a precision that surprises me each time. Two boys slightly older are engaged in a negotiation that has crossed a line and become something physical, a contest of shoulders and elbows conducted without words. One of the mothers intervenes, separates them with a single firm movement, and immediately turns back to the other woman as though the interruption never happened, resuming mid-sentence a conversation that has been going on for some time.
The mothers talk in the way women who know each other very well talk: not in complete sentences but in gestures and fragments, the full meaning residing not in the words but in the interval between them, in the particular pause that says yes, I know, I know exactly. Both carry bags. Large canvas bags, utilitarian, filled with the specific weight of a day's end — shopping, children's clothes, the small administrative objects that accumulate in a life. The fathers stand slightly apart, conducting their own separate conversation at a lower register, a murmur that does not carry.
The children scream. Not in distress. In joy, or something adjacent to joy, something that at this age is indistinguishable from joy but may simply be the excess energy of a body that has not yet learned to contain itself.
The two old men listen. Not ostensibly, not with turned heads, but in the way you listen to a sound you know so well it has entered the body and stays there without asking permission. The noise of children is a frequency both of them recognise, each in his own separate history, and which now fills the space between them with something that is not conversation and is not loneliness, but somewhere between the two — a kind of involuntary companionship in the face of an absent thing.
These families could have been theirs. Not their specific families — not the same people, not the same faces — but the structure: two adults, children, a summer evening, the stop, waiting for the bus. That structure existed once in their own lives too, each at his own moment, on another street or perhaps this very one, in front of another shelter or perhaps this very one, when it was new or when it did not yet exist. Now the structure belongs to others. They are left with its photograph.
Then they arrive.
They come from the direction of the minimarket across the street — a small establishment with a green awning and a hand-painted sign that has been fading for several years. They come together, which is to say they walk at the same pace and in the same direction but at the distance of people who have spent a shift together and have exhausted the available conversation. Both wear green T-shirts: the uniform of the minimarket, which uses green as its identifying colour in the manner of those small commercial enterprises that decided, at some early point, upon a brand and committed to it through all subsequent evolution. He pulls a small wheeled suitcase in burgundy. She carries a canvas rucksack and a plastic bag. They stop at the shelter. They glance for a moment at the unscratched bench, at the unlit screen, at the concrete plinth with its patient cable. And they wait.
It takes me several minutes to understand that they do not speak.
They communicate by moving their hands. Not sign language in its formal version — not the fluid, rapid, rigorous system — but something that incorporates it and exceeds it, something that includes the movement of the hands and also the movement of the face, the angle of the head, the slight lift of an eyebrow, the direction of a gaze. He says something to her — or rather, his hands say something to her, and his face says the rest — and she responds, and I cannot follow it, I am not meant to follow it, but I can see that it is a conversation of some intimacy and some complexity. She makes a gesture that makes him smile. The smile lasts a moment, then subsides. Between them and the black screen of the non-functioning display there is a certain fellowship that I cannot name otherwise: two silent presences in a space that promises sound and light and has not yet delivered either — though the plinth is there, and the cable is laid.
The old man on the right watches them. Not directly — it is not his way — but with the same lateral attention he gave the children. Hands that speak. Faces that complete what hands cannot say. Something in his posture shifts imperceptibly, a slight softening, as though he recognises something. What exactly, I cannot say. Perhaps simply the fact that two people can hold an entire conversation without making a sound and the world continues around them just the same. Perhaps something else.
The old man on the left does not watch them at all. Or if he does, it does not show. He finishes eating. He folds the aluminium foil in his palm with a small, definitive gesture.
The children have noticed the couple in green. Children always notice. Two of the younger ones have stopped moving and stand staring with the unfiltered attention that children grant to things they do not understand. One of the mothers draws the nearest child gently back into the orbit of the family.
The couple in green T-shirts wait. They do not consult their phones. They look at the road. Their hands continue to speak, less frequently now, in short sentences. A remark. A reply. A silence. Another remark. The unfinished station shelters them as best it can — the metal roof holds off the sky, the bench offers a place to sit, the dead screen tells them nothing about the bus, the cable in the plinth sells them no ticket. They manage without. As always.
The bus comes from the east.
It comes with its lights on — white at the front, the orange of the indicator blinking once, twice, then going still — and it sighs as it stops, the hydraulic sigh of something large releasing the effort of motion. The doors open. The couple in green T-shirts move towards the doors with the efficiency of people who have done this many times: he manages the suitcase, she adjusts the rucksack, they pass through the door, they are gone. The bus is already closing its doors. The bus pulls away. The bus is gone. An old bus, diesel-powered, not one of the sixty-four. But it runs. And it has taken them.
The silence after the bus is different from the silence before it.
The families gather themselves. Bags adjusted, children collected, the particular choreography of leaving set in motion. The two mothers exchange a final remark. One of the fathers lifts a small child to his shoulder. The girl with the wheeled toy drags it one last time across the pavement — the final clatter, brief, decisive — and then she too is lifted.
The old man on the left raises his eyes when the father lifts the child to his shoulder. He watches for a few seconds — that specific movement, the arms that catch, the small weight lifted, the child's head appearing suddenly above everyone else's — and something in his face tightens and loosens almost simultaneously, too quickly to be certain I have seen it correctly. Perhaps he has a son who does this somewhere. Perhaps he watched it for the first time decades ago and has not seen it in some time. Perhaps none of that. Perhaps he simply looked.
The old man on the right watches the girls leave, the mothers, the large canvas bags. He watches the girl with the toy in particular, until she disappears at the corner of the street and the clattering fades into the distance. He keeps his gaze in that direction for a few seconds after the sound has already gone. Then he turns back to the road.
They leave in two directions, the families, and within three minutes the shelter and the pavement around it hold nothing but the grey metal, the dark sky, the concrete plinth with its cable, the dead screen, the unscratched bench, and the two old men.
Who have not moved.
The one who was eating has finished eating. His hands are now still on his knees, the bag closed at his feet. He looks at the road. The one who was drinking has finished the bottle — I can see it now on the wall beside him, set down with care, empty, brown in the street light — and he too looks at the road. They are ten metres apart. They do not appear to know each other. They do not speak.
And yet, in the quiet that has settled now, there is something shared between them, something that was not there at the beginning of the evening. Not a conversation, not a glance exchanged, not a gesture. Something less than that and perhaps more: the fact of having been in the same place, at the same time, with the same families seen and the same children followed and the same bus waited for without waiting for it. Two parallel histories that do not touch and do not need to.
A car passes. The headlights cross the man on the left, the one who ate, and for a moment his face is fully visible — sixty years of weather, the particular stillness of a man who has been still for a long time, and something around the eyes that resembles exhaustion but is not exhaustion, is something else entirely, is precisely the opposite of exhaustion, is the condition of a man who has moved through exhaustion and now simply is — and then the light passes and he is in the half-dark again.
Another car. The headlights cross the man on the right. The same kind of face, differently assembled: attentive, calm, with a trace of something at the corners of his mouth that might be wry amusement or might be something else entirely. The light passes.
I wait for them to move. They do not move.
I understand, slowly, in the way you understand things that have been visible all along.
They were not waiting for the bus. They were waiting for the bus to pass. They were waiting for the families to leave, for the children to leave, for the silent couple in green T-shirts to board and disappear, for the bus to take everyone and go. They were waiting for the road to be empty and the light to be what it is now. But perhaps they were waiting for something else too, something they have not formulated and which I cannot formulate in their place: the presence for a few minutes of families that were not theirs, of children that were not theirs, of the sound of a toy on the pavement that they knew from another life or another street or another time within the same life.
Not sentimentality. Not declared nostalgia. But something drier and more precise: the confirmation that the world continues to produce what it has always produced — children who run, mothers who separate boys who shove each other, fathers who lift daughters to their shoulders — and that they are still here to see it, on this evening, on this street, beside an unfinished station with a concrete plinth and a cable in black tape.
The old men didn't wait for the bus because the bus was an event on their calendar. They waited for the event to pass — for time itself to pass without being consumed by them. This is a different relationship with time from the one the rest of us maintain. We consume time: we fill it, spend it, waste it, save it, race against it. They had arrived at something beyond that — a position outside time's ordinary jurisdiction, from which the passing of a bus and the passing of an hour and the passing of a summer evening were the same order of event, witnessed with the same unhurried attention. The bus came. The families left. The children's noise faded. The couple in green disappeared through a door. The street emptied. All of it simply happened, the way weather happens, and they were present for it without being implicated in it.
Perhaps they too saw the renderings on the council's Facebook page. Perhaps they too know that the completion is coming in eight days, or eighteen, or eighty. Perhaps it does not interest them. The unfinished station shelters them as best it can. The metal roof holds off the sky. The bench is there. The plinth is poured. The cable is laid. The rest will come when it comes — and this time, there are reasonable grounds to believe that it will.
The car that passes now is moving fast, the kind of speed you reach on a secondary road only when you believe you are alone on it. Its headlights sweep across the shelter, across the two old men, across the empty stop, across the place where the families were and the couple were, across the unlit screen, across the cable wrapped in black tape, across the concrete plinth that is a beginning, and then the car is past and the sound of it diminishes rapidly towards the east.
I do not know if the driver saw them. Probably not. At that speed, on that street, at that hour, the old men at the shelter are part of the scenery, present the way the grey metal is present and the way the dead screen is present. Existing. Waiting. Nowhere in any hurry.
The station will be finished soon. Everything will be lit, connected, functional. There will be real-time timetables and ticket machines and, somewhere in the foreseeable future, sixty-four electric buses gliding silently through these streets. The grandchildren of those who left may come to see it. Or they will not come. Either way, the buses will be there.
The old men will still be standing ten metres apart and looking at the road. The electric bus will pass just as the diesel one did. And they will remain, with everything they have seen this evening and with everything they will say to nobody about it.
Some things are not modernised. But some things do change. And some things remain exactly as they were, regardless of how many electric buses pass before them.
Author's Note
What is real and what is not
The station exists. It stands on a secondary street in a city in north-eastern Romania, installed a few weeks before this was written, unfinished. The metal is grey, fresh paint. The concrete plinth with the cable wrapped in black tape exists physically — I touched it. The bench is there. The screen is dark. The project of sixty-four electric buses is real: a council resolution, European funds, an accepted deadline.
The old men exist. I saw them. One was eating, the other drinking beer, at approximately the distance described. I do not know their names, their histories, or whether they have grandchildren in Italy or in the town itself or nowhere at all. Everything attributed to their thoughts is fiction constructed from bodily observation — the direction of a gaze, the duration of a pause, the way a man raises his eyes when a father lifts a child to his shoulder. I have converted gestures into biography. This is the first sin of literary reportage and I acknowledge it without apologising for it.
The two families exist. The children genuinely screamed. The girl with the wheeled toy existed and that specific sound — the clatter on the pavement — existed. The couple in green T-shirts exist: they work at the minimarket across the street, they are genuinely deaf-mute, they came with luggage, they took the bus. I do not know whether they observed the unfinished station with the attention I attributed to them. Probably not. I was the one observing, not them.
The heat is real. The hour is real. The end of June is real. The asphalt does breathe on summer evenings in cities like this one, after long days of sun, and the expression is not metaphor — it is a verifiable physical sensation.
The bus came and left.
Tensions and limits
The first tension is structural: the text claims to be reportage — physically present witness, verifiable details, precise time and place — but operates consistently with the instruments of fiction. The old men's thoughts, the look that lasts precisely as long as the recognition of something you have known for a long time and no longer have near, the never-confirmed biography of absent grandchildren — all of this is invented. Not invented arbitrarily, but constructed from real bodily indices; invented nonetheless. Literary reportage lives inside this tension and cannot resolve it. It can only declare it, as I am doing now.
The second tension is one of perspective: the narrator positions himself as a neutral witness, an eye that registers without intervening. But the choice to follow the old men rather than the families, to grant the deaf-mute couple a fellowship with the dead screen, to build the final revelation around their immobility — these are all editorial decisions that produce a particular meaning and exclude others. The station could have been written from the girl's point of view, the one with the wheeled toy. It would have been an entirely different text and equally true.
The third tension is temporal: the text is written after the event, not in real time. Between observation and writing there is a distance in which memory selects, recomposes, and adds coherence to a chaos that in the moment of experience had none. The scene in which the old man raises his eyes when the father lifts the child to his shoulder — did I see that? Or did I see something adjacent and memory completed it? I cannot say with certainty. I know I wrote it as though I were certain.
The fourth tension is ethical: I have written about real people without their consent. The old men do not know they exist in this text. The deaf-mute couple does not know. The families do not know. I have attributed to them thoughts, biographies, emotional histories I never verified. This is standard practice in literary reportage and remains a genuine ethical problem regardless of how standardised it is.
The Aesopic language — what is buried in the structure
The text contains several arguments embedded in its structure, never declared explicitly, which I now name.
The first concerns public promises. The unfinished station with its dead screen and cable in black tape is not merely a station — it is a figure of the relationship between local administration and citizen in small Romanian cities: the promise exists, the beginning exists, the completion is suspended in a soon that may last eight days or eight years. The text does not criticise explicitly, does not moralise, does not name the responsible parties — but the geometry of the scene makes the critique in place of the words. The people standing under sheet metal looking at a cable in black tape, knowing that it will be fine, but not knowing exactly when, is a political description disguised as sensory description.
The second concerns the departed generation. The old men's grandchildren who send messages on Sundays from Italy or Germany are not mentioned as a social problem — there is no paragraph about depopulation, about migration, about cities that age. And yet the old men are alone at a bus stop at ten in the evening, watching families that are not theirs, recognising gestures from a life that has moved elsewhere. The absence is present in the text without being named. This is the Aesopic argument: what is not said explicitly carries the primary weight.
The third concerns silence as a form of dignity. The deaf-mute couple is the only pair in the scene that communicates without noise, without performance, without any need to be heard. In a scene full of children screaming and mothers talking and men discussing luminous projects with sixty-four buses, the two in green T-shirts constitute by contrast an argument about the sufficiency of non-performative communication. This is not an argument about deafness — it is an argument about the economy of language.
Rhetorical instruments
Alternating rhythm. The text deliberately oscillates between short, telegraphic sentences (The bus is gone.) and long, breathing sentences with multiple subordinate clauses. The rhythm mimics the structure of waiting: long periods of nothing, followed by short dense event. This is the central technique borrowed from Kapuściński and applied consistently.
Detail as argument. No detail in the text is purely decorative. Aluminium foil means food prepared at home, means economy, means a certain age and a certain relationship with resources. The brown bottle set carefully on the wall means the same thing and more: the gesture of placing something carefully when nobody is watching is a gesture of self-respect that requires no audience. The deaf man's burgundy trolley suitcase means he is going home after a work shift, not on holiday — an entire biography in the colour of a suitcase.
Structural repetitions.I do not know if the driver saw them. I do not know if anyone does. This construction appears in several variants throughout the text and functions as a refrain that shifts the question from the particular to the general: it is not about the specific driver, it is about the social visibility of solitary old men in public space.
Objects as characters. The cable wrapped in black tape, the dead screen, the concrete plinth — these are not backgrounds; they are characters with their own status. They are attributed qualities — patient, dead, waiting — that are simultaneously precise physical description and emotional projection. This technique, sometimes called the pathetic fallacy in the English rhetorical tradition, is used deliberately and with the knowledge that it is a convention, not an ontological truth.
The deferred revelation. The final understanding — that the old men were not waiting for the bus but for its passing — is present implicitly throughout the text but declared explicitly only near the end. This deferral is rhetorical, not narrative: the reader who has followed the text has already understood, and the explicit declaration serves to confirm rather than to reveal. Kapuściński uses this technique in Shah of Shahs with the revelation about the nature of fear. I borrow it without embarrassment.
The author's subjectivism and the mild Kapuściński hypocrisy
It must be said plainly: I write in the style of Kapuściński with the same honesty with which a twentieth-century painter painted in the style of Cézanne. That is: with genuine admiration, with conscious appropriation of technique, and with the awareness that the original remains the original regardless of how well the imitation succeeds.
Kapuściński was in Iran, in Angola, in Ethiopia — in places where history was being produced with noise and blood, and he was there with his body, with his fear, with malaria in some cases. I am at a bus stop in a city in north-eastern Romania, at ten in the evening, on a June night, watching two old men and a family with children. The existential stakes are incomparably smaller. To apply his instruments to this scene is an act of humility in relation to proportion — and at the same time, if the text works, an argument that the instruments are larger than the subjects for which they were built.
The hypocrisy consists in the following gesture: I distance myself rhetorically from Kapuściński by declaring that I imitate him consciously, which produces an appearance of critical modesty, but the text itself simultaneously takes its own grandeur seriously — the asphalt breathes, a position outside time's ordinary jurisdiction, the photograph of a structure that once belonged to others. You cannot write with large instruments and claim to be small. Or you can, but nobody will believe you, including yourself.
My specific subjectivism: I have a weakness for solitary old men in public space, which I bring to any scene where one exists. There is a real risk that I have projected onto these two men an emotion I carry rather than one they carry, and that the text is in equal measure disguised autobiography and genuine observation. I cannot fully separate the two. I do not try — but I warn the reader.
This text was written in more sessions, from direct observation, without a recording device and without the consent of those described. Any error of perception is mine. Any truth found in it most probably belongs to them.