Walking Alone

People have narrow ideas of the meaning of things. Who knew that an empty hand could be a vacancy sign?

She walks down narrow dark streets, shadows turning in doorframes, and lets her hands swing.

Once,there was a boy who'd caught her fingers and folded them into his, stopped the pendulum swings. Knowing, somehow, that the light airy movement was an invitation, a vacancy sign. She'd walked with him, held his hand down those tropic streets studded with palm trees. Her head fit perfectly in the crook under his neck, and in the sound of his heartbeat was all the happiness in the world.

But the bind of their fingertips was weak, and in a time he let go. She wanders thin alleyways walled in by tall grubby buildings, and lets her hands swing.

The wind that whistles through empty fingers feels, she imagines, like sadness itself.