“Where we live nothing is connected. The brick on one side of the building turns a corner to rows of vinyl siding, and then drops to halved oval thatches like the roofs of cottages by the sea. Like when the girl who lives beneath me left a note on the gate for the mailman, which I read every word of only to watch him later toting his letters back to his truck without having seen it, and it didn’t occur to me to stop him. The same way that, when I saw her later eating lunch alone in the garden, it didn’t occur to me to sit in the empty chair beside her, to ask about the tomatoes she grows in the pots by her door.”
from The Building
