• I stare across the table at her. She should be beautiful in the morning glow. But I can never tell from my spot so far away. I watch her sip at her coffee, a demure viper. She glances at the clock before rising and moving into the kitchen.

    The sound of the kettle starting to boil. She returns with a freshly steaming cup, her final warm up before work, out there, in the real world. I glance down at my paper, it all seems so meaningless now; market crashes, military scrambles, Greenpeace, housing booms, eco friendly, gender bender, child illiteracy, league tables, cash for honours, public standards, the nanny state, celebrity sex scandal, popcorn lungs, extremism, state welfare, by elections, party solidarity… all just words.

    I can feel her cold dead eyes boring into me, but I don’t look up. I can’t, she’s not looking at me, she’s looking for me, she’s looking through me. I am invisible to her now. Perhaps another time it might have been different, she might have forgotten, but not now, not today.

    The 229 sails serenely past the window crammed full of hopes and wishes, to be promptly followed by the 240. Two birds fight over yesterday’s crumbs left out on the mossy table. The clock in the hall strikes ten. She rises again, leaving her breakfast detritus at her seat. Somebody else’s mess.

    I feel her float past, the smell of Seville oranges and mortality, once more I can’t bring myself to look at her, too afraid, too lost. Her feet thud noiselessly on the stairs and I am with myself again. I am unlike her. I am unlike the buses with their codes and order, I am unlike the hectic birds and their frantic struggle for life. I am the clock in the hall. I tick and I sit and I wait.

    I am totally apart from the world of coffee and politics of romance and people. I am disconnected. I am disconnected.