A Day of Allowance

 

(A Short Story)


I entered the day the way one enters a room someone has just left— leaving behind warmth and the coffee smell that wraps around you from all sides. The morning was neither early nor late—it simply was. Light rested neatly on the windowsill, like a note from one’s mother, left for her school-aged son on the kitchen table, unsigned.
I read it with my eyes and chose not to answer. Stayed silent for a moment. Looked out the window.

The city breathed its quiet waking from sleep. A tram chimed as if apologizing.
A street sweeper brushed away yesterday’s words— dropped in haste, settled by the curb. Everything unfolded naturally, without explanations.
I have always valued such days: they do not demand participation, only permit presence.

On the table stood a cup of tea gone cold. I drank it slowly, the way one drinks a memory that has not yet decided what it is— pain or joy, tension or release, an inhale or an exhale. The tea carried something medicinal, something library-like,
something barely perceptible— a kind of sediment, as if from yesterday’s thought,
left unfinished by its aftertaste.

I stepped outside. The air smelled of old paper and iron. Passersby moved past me wearing the faces of people with alibis. One man, very serious, carried a folder under his arm— clearly empty. A woman smiled at a shop window as if her youth were reflected there, rather than a mannequin looking back through slightly dusted glass.
I noted it automatically, the way one notes coincidences, without drawing conclusions.

In an alley that is always darker than it ought to be, I sensed a slight mismatch. Not fear—rather, a correction in the text of reality. A cat sat on the hood of a car, watching me with the gaze of a bureaucrat who knows everything but is under no obligation to report it.
We exchanged silence. He won. After that, walking felt somehow easier.

From there on, steps assembled themselves into sentences, observed images into footnotes. I remembered a person who has long since left this world, and for a second he stood beside me— exactly long enough not to interfere. It was not mysticism, but the bookkeeping of memory: debit, credit, forms and figures, the shadow of what has gone and what has been spent.

By evening, I thought, this day too would resemble a carefully balanced ledger. For a while it would take its place in the unsteady clarity of tastes, sensations, visual impressions, smells, and sounds. I would return home and realize that nothing remarkable had happened.
Precisely for that reason, something would remain with me.

And suddenly it seemed to me that sometimes the richest thing is not an event, but its absence. Absence can last almost endlessly; it does not spoil, and it leaves within us a quiet, persistent yes that asks for no continuation.












Konstantin =BGDT= Privalov,
Kakheti