Reappearance | Aya Lafillette

That the man came from a long distance in time was an irrefutably accepted fact. At once everyone had so understood when he was here again.
It was a small community after all, this building. Not the city – this sprawling megalopolis – but this corner of its vast urban landscape, this strip of a district built upon the century-old landfill back when we didn’t know what to do with all the non-degradable trash; here, in the middle of this neck of the woods, our residential complex residually persisted, and on its wall clung the ghost of the building next door. Some nights, we could hear it crying. These were houses put up around the turn of the century. The one pulled down was painted in pastel yellow: ours, still standing, pale blue.
The man was my old lover. A lover only for a few weeks, then he stepped through our wall in the stairwell, was gone. I had never forgotten him (how could any of us?). I did not once regret that a stable family life wasn't ours. That was not the sort of sentiment we shared during that transient and enormous affair in my third-floor flat, that engulfed the whole of this pale blue house and its residents in one way or the other.
There was something peculiar, and forceful, that bound us two beyond our bodies, affection, or time and space. It was such an oddly spectacular thing to come upon a life of someone so mundane like me, and the same went for all my neighbours, that it didn’t even occur to me at the time that the thing that was happening between us was a love affair. Nightly we consumed each other and slept inside the other’s heart, without knowing whether he was staying, where he was going, whether returning, or where it was that he had come from to begin with. Our passion seeped through the walls and affected all who resided under the roof.
Everyone wept when he left. The cats yowled unusually and the dogs went astray not to return for months or even years in one case. Leo and Theo, the twins from the ground floor who managed a tabac: they stopped talking to each other and began communicating only with their eyes. Erinda started working and her husband began painting. It was such a sad affair, that when our tears dried and we opened our eyes, we never mentioned him again vocally, because his image dwelt in each of our eyes and they mentioned him without sound every time we greeted each other in the stairwell. Why and all those other Ws were much too destructive to invite into our conversations.
So just as the time before his arrival, we spoke of the heirloom tomatoes from Marie in the purple house and organically grown turnips from the district C market – that sort of despondent trivial stuff that appeared as of grave importance in the talk’s duration. We didn’t even dare to talk about the leak in the roof or the crack on the clock face’s glass at the entryway that apparently needed replacement, and let each other tend to these things with the unspoken understanding.
Our lives had always been monotonous, but it felt as though we had turned even more mute after him. The man had taken our sound with him, it was as if. When the man came and went, we learnt the meaning of the loss of what we never knew we had. When the old man Reilly in the attic passed away seven years ago, the last image we saw in his eyes were the man’s dark face. And we all silently wept all over again, even though so many years had gone by already then and we had all been pretending the memory had faded.
The man was found standing next to the iron railing on my balcony. Mitsou’s son, who was delivering me back the casserole dish and having a secret cigarette before returning to his mother, found him. The boy was just before his fifteenth birthday the next Wednesday – he was not even born when the man was here as my lover – even then he recognised the man and turned pale. Fear and awe swept across this child’s face, and at once his voice broke and he was growing into a man. When Mitsou saw her boy a moment later, she was overcome with pride inspired by that certain melancholy one acquires in growing into adulthood, that had now stained his eyes.
My lover looked the same after all those years. I was not twenty anymore – grey chunks in the hair and wrinkles around the eyes – but as he stepped into the room from the balcony and beheld my faded face, his gaze was as though he saw me just the same as he himself was, for he had perfectly black hair, smooth skin and straight backbone, in his white shirt and grey trousers, black leather shoes with pointed toes, dark eyes, shrouded in the perfume that reminded one of last century. We embraced and it was again like an extraordinary story, and everyone in the pale blue house felt like they were the protagonists too. The house itself appeared to glow brighter, painting its crumbling stucco freshly periwinkle. We were all old, a couple of us dead, and the new ones like Mitsou’s son and the granddaughter of the neighbour below me was only eighteen too, born decades after he had left, but we all felt so glad that the man was here again.
“Why?” all the Ws poured out of me, as I had made myself like a silly young thing for the first time since I was that age. “Why did you go away? Where did you go? What have you been doing? Who are you and why do you look like that while I and the rest of us are like this?”
And the man looked so sad and devastated, holding my old hand to his nude chest, and there was a tear at the corner of his eye, sliding onto our shared pillow.
“Because this place is Nowhere, everyone remains No One, time is broken and becomes Never, and things become trapped till it is Nothing. The only thing I can bring is Desire.”
And so he stayed at our pale blue building like back then, and Mitsou’s son began revering my lover and the granddaughter of the neighbour below me felt feverish thinking of the man. Someone said Reilly really died brokenhearted because of the man. The man’s presence agitated our cats, dogs obeyed him instead of their owners, and the goldfish jumped out of the water too many times that we had to cover the vessels so that one may save them from air. Erinda’s husband confessed to her that he wanted a child with her, and they began squabbling – he felt that he still could, but she couldn’t anymore, and it was such a vexatious affair they brought upon us the mood. The twins started talking with voice again, and all they could say was how old the other was.
So the man kissed and kissed me, his deep eyes saturated with the vital despair. I asked him.
“When will you come back?”
Once again, we were left behind, and lived day to day pretending, like before. What sadness: the vacancy in this faded blue house, that dominated our lives inside. We could not understand where he had gone, why he had to go, and even what he truly was.
To this day, crawling up to my third-floor flat on my wobbly legs, I still pause to gaze at the wall in the stairwell where he left from. I cannot even see a shadow there. He just vanished like the time before. – And I still don’t know why me: an ordinary, mundane, no one.
The extraordinary always urged suffering – so much pain that it makes the ghost of the building next door cry.

Aya stands at the faultline between exile and desire, trudging through imagination to reclaim a beauty the world withholds, with the hope it will lead her home. Forged through uprootedness and despair, Aya writes across cultures, identities, and genders toward a vision brighter than silence.