My chain has learned the colour of waiting—
rust-brown, the shade of afternoons
that no one comes for.
I know his footsteps from the lift lobby,
the way they slow near the letterbox,
pause, then pass.
There are days he comes.
He pumps my tyres with a kind of apology,
his hands remembering something
they almost forgot. We go out
past the canal, past the field where the mynahs
argue in the long grass,
and I think: this. this is what I am.
But mostly I stand here
cataloguing what I have lost to stillness—
the small give of my brake pads,
the loosening spoke on the rear wheel
I cannot tell him about,
the way my seat has memorised
a shape that no longer sits in it.
When it rains, I know before he does.
The sky makes its decision
and I make mine: to be still,
to not want the road so loudly.
I watch the water pool in my bell
like a tiny, useless reservoir.
Upstairs, behind the door across the hall,
hangs the Pinarello.
I have seen it through the gap of an open door—
white and untouchable, its carbon frame
never asked to be useful,
only beautiful, only kept.
Hooks in the wall. A dedicated cloth.
A love with no weather in it.
I do not hate it.
I understand what it means
to be someone's good thing,
their proof of something.
I only wonder what it knows
of moving through a world
that wasn't built for you,
of being taken out
under an uncertain sky
and returned, and returned,
and returned—
each return its own
small proof of something too.