We Know This All Too Often

By Peter Bowden


For Her

The girl sat beneath the sagging crepe myrtle, her back pressed to the warm brick of the house. The petals had begun to fall, pink like something too tender, like a secret she hadn’t meant to keep. Her knees were pulled up to her chest, arms wrapped tight. From inside came the faint clatter of dishes, voices rising and falling like music she couldn’t quite dance to.

Across the street, a woman walked her dog. A car idled in a driveway. Lights came on in houses where people were laughing or arguing or calling each other to dinner. But none of that touched her. She looked at it all with a stillness that came from knowing how to disappear without going anywhere. And somewhere in the quiet, she imagined another girl, far away, sitting just the same—under a tree, on a step, in a small room no one bothered to knock on.

They didn’t know each other, these two girls. But they would’ve recognized the weight in each other’s shoulders, the way the light bends a little when you feel forgotten. Loneliness, she understood, was a story told in every language, in every town. And it always ended the same: with someone waiting for a voice that didn’t come.


For Him

The boy sat on the back steps of a quiet house, where the porch light had burned out last week and no one had thought to replace it. His feet were bare. The grass was warm from the afternoon, but the night had started to come on with that slow, inevitable hush that settles into summer like a hand over the heart.

He had a toy in his hand—a little green soldier, bent and scuffed—and he rolled it in his palm like a secret. Across the yard, in another house where the kitchen light still glowed yellow, another boy stood in his own window, watching. They didn’t wave. They didn’t call. But they saw each other, in that way lonely people do, like sailors drifting in different boats who nod once and say nothing. The wind didn’t move, but a kind of silence passed between them, the kind that says, I know.

The soldier dropped into the grass. The screen door creaked shut behind him. Inside, someone was laughing at a television show with the volume too loud. And still the boy paused, hand on the doorframe, the taste of wanting caught in his throat. Because loneliness, he was learning, didn’t care where you were or who you lived with. It only needed a quiet corner. And every house had one.

 



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