Creeping

I knew it was wrong but I did it anyway.

Searched her up at midnight wondering what she was doing.

Was it boredom? Exhaustion?

Once I went out of my way to avoid seeing her in elevators and lobbies of a building we both worked in ( — to no avail really as I still ran into her on the streets, at the help bar, elsewhere — ) and now I was looking for seeds of her life to satisfy a hunger for something that could never be.

I popped the name in the search bar and began sifting.

Instagram. Facebook. Public records. An address in a part of the city I knew and once lived in.

That’s how I found myself in the dark, creeping into a stairwell at midnight to look at a mailbox where I saw her hand in the way an address was handwritten into a mailbox card.

40 was the street number.

The distinctive long horizontal line in the 4 gave me a little rush that I recognized when I got her appointment reminders 48 hours ahead of time.

How pathetic. 57 and standing in the shadows for what?

Part of me doesn’t really want to know, afraid to understand just how big the hole in my life may really be.

The other part knows and is filled with self-loathing.

It is surprising how much regret there is over what I didn’t do and who I never became — a silent rejection of who I am now.

Worse, in the moment, I imagine what would really come of it if she came down those stairs or somehow knew what was happening?

Fear would fill her eyes. Destruction of all that I have and am would likely follow for me

It is wrong. And I know it. But I do it anyway.

What a fool I am. What a fool.