a view, from my room, of other rooms

A room with walls painted poppy red; curtains partly drawn. In the flat above that, four pairs of underwear seem to be hanging by the window from the inside; the shape of that one pair of brief in the centre is most recognizable as bronze-tinted lights from the ceiling filters its fabric. As for the flat to its right, a worm of brownish light seeps through the gap where the curtains should overlap, and just now, someone closed the curtains completely. I saw his shadow just now, his arm reaching up to adjust the air-conditioner. It looked like a man. That abrupt moving of the curtains seemed to me to be an act of a man peeking down at me from behind the cloth, criticizing me for making prose so late at night, or envying, perhaps, of my romantic tendency to write in this late hour with a desk lamp over my toothpaste-white keyboard and a whiskey glass filled with green tea over ice cubes. Enough about me. Across from my window at my eye-level, in the unit with the tainted translucent windows shut, the fluorescent ceiling lamp outlines of a pair of jeans hanging off the window frame from the inside. The flat to its right has its lights out, curtains left open on purpose, perhaps, as thought of by a tenant so fond of streetlights reflected onto the walls of the home; a compact disc, dangling off a string tied to the air-conditioner, sways slightly like a pendulum, slicing glimpses of the metallic spectrum that catch the eyes, even now, ten minutes before midnight.