The town is half empty of cars. The University completely empty of people. Thursday saw the start of the exodus. Loneliness is confirmed every day by the ramdom souls that stretch to the sun in the complex’s pool. Some flowers are even already gone too. Those beautiful trees full in purple bloom are bare now, waiting for the leaves. Many of the international guys stayed here. We met again with our Indian neighbor in the laundry room. He does not ever speak much, except for a “How are you?”. We always wave goodbye from our bikes. Everytime we meet I always feel I have to talk more to him. He seems very lonely, but what still intrigues me the most is his statement on the orientation week where he said that he would devote 4 hours for social and entertainment life a week. I have to ask him if he has managed to do so. Hope he does not feel offended. Our Thailandese neighbors are also away, we do not hear their constant stepping through the floor. Maybe even the Japanese that lives in front of us is not here, and he is the champion of solitude. He is the one that asks the courier to leave the boxes outside his apartment all the time. This could be a symptom of, at the least, the loneliness of his apartment. A newspaper subscription remain in the parking lot. The facts of a nearby city are left in the pavement until someone like me takes the bag of the unread documents into the thrash can. Our window looks into the back wall of yet another apartment building. The windows facing our main view are the small ventilation openings of their bathrooms and the metal boxes of the air conditioning units. We can tell by the number of these windows lit at night of the uninhabited units. There is a small and narrow lawn in between my building and that one in front of it. At the middle, a wire fence divides property. A black pot has lied since months ago on the other side of the fence. It appeared one day and no one has cared to pick it up. “There’s a little black spot in the sun today. Its the same old thing as yesterday”.
