I watched as they placed her on a pedestal in the town square.

She was like a goddess. A marble goddess in a flowing white toga. I noticed her small breasts and pouting mouth, her tightly-plaited hair and her downcast eyes. She seemed alone and vulnerable.

I watched as the two lethargic workers untied her from a cart and with groaning ropes and much cursing lift her unceremoniously onto a plinth.

Later that day she looked up at me and I looked back. Much later, after many such exchanges, she smiled. It was a small but perceptible gesture. One that lifted my spirits and filled my heart.

I have a recurring dream.

I sit astride my prancing steed. The day is bright and warm and children crawl over me as usual. The stickiness of their toffee fingers mixes with the dust about my shoulders — and the noise, the laughter and the yelling penetrate deeper and deeper into my being until finally I am able to move.

Children scream. People run. I dismount and walk toward her. The pandemonium increases but I continue. Someone shrieks, “Help!”, and someone else shouts, “Run! Run!”

I want them to run. I want the rain to come to wash away the dust and the stench from my smooth body. I want to be alone and walk toward her and touch her white marble flesh.

One day, when it’s right, I will go to her. I, the bronze horseman. The one who waits at the other end of the square.

I watched as Ito wiped his hands. He had completed painting and stood back for a moment allowing himself time to enjoy his work. It had taken many months. First finding the door and then hanging it in our apartment. I called it the ‘door to nowhere’ because that’s what it was — Ito’s beautifully painted red door that opened onto a blank wall.

When I asked him why? He simply answered, “Why not?”

In time, Ito knew every square inch of the door, every crack, scratch and sound it made. And yes, he believed he could hear the door talk to him, just as distinctly he said as he could hear the slow, methodical in and out of his own breath.

He talked of the door’s solitariness and if he dared swing it open, there would be nothing and yet everything. Every possibility. Every dream. Every kind and horrid word ever spoken. Every form of love. Everything in heaven and on earth, both good and bad, sat behind the door and so he left it closed.

Some nights he woke troubled by dreams and would walk naked through the dark apartment and then settle in front of the door, listening, waiting, seeking to understand. One night I heard Ito speaking the way a patient speaks to a psychiatrist or a child to its mother. It seemed he simply obeyed an impulse to start communicating with the door and from then on I often heard him leave his bed to sit on the floor, thumbing his Mala beads and, if the mood took him, he would speak softly and candidly.

I talked with Ito when he wanted and gave him space when he wanted that. We had been room mates for many years and it seemed the right thing to do. He was on a personal quest so why should I become an inquisitor. Anyway, I liked his quirkiness and how through all this he’d developed an air of serene melancholy, a quiet, non-verbal persona that seemed to authenticate and nurture him.

Ito disappeared on a Tuesday. The red door was open. On the floor beside it was a tin of black paint.

Initially, I thought he’d popped out for some coffee. That night, I was convinced he’d gone home to his parents. A few days later I thought maybe he just needed a break.

Now, two months later I’m certain Ito won’t return. So last night I decided to open the tin and start painting the door.

“Why not?” I thought.

Ten months after Samantha left I was still trying to find her, still trying to regain what I had lost. Although at nineteen, if you’d have asked me exactly what that was, I probably would have bored you with some banal statement about my feelings and my love and the unfairness of it all. I know now that whatever I felt back then was guided by only two things — my dick and my stomach.

My relationship with Samantha was never simple. In fact, it was closer to some grasping, sadistic thing that seemed to satisfy and delight both of us on one the hand and send me into severe bouts of depression and her into raging tantrums on the other. Her leaving was probably the only sane thing that happened over the almost two and a half years we were together.

It was sometime during the eleventh month after she left that I decided to cut my wrists with a shiny new Wilkinson Sword razor blade that was once my father’s. I found a packet of them at the back of the medicine cabinet, took one to my room and then tossed a coin to see if I was going to live or die.

“Heads, oblivion. Tails …”

Needless to say I didn’t die. I tossed the coin and it did fall head-side up, but after sitting on the corner of my bed for a minute or two thinking about oblivion, my stomach called.

“Hey John! John! Hows about some food? Get up off your ass and fill this gaping hole! Come on John! You can commit suicide later, on a full stomach.”

My stomach hasn’t stopped arguing with me to this day, but my dick — that old friend, that strictly male appendage, well these days, it lies quietly resting, warm and snug inside its cotton hammock. Sometimes I even forget it’s there, well, metaphorically speaking I forget and during those increasingly extended periods you might say I become somewhat freer. One elemental hunger, one primal urge has been conquered and finally satiated. Well, almost.

I never saw Samantha again but I always remember her and once a year I celebrate with the flip of a coin and that old Wilkinson Sword razor blade that was once my father’s.