Notice period

I didn't notice so much today, not because there was nothing to notice, but because my head was away across a quarter of the world, ninety degrees sliding around the surface of the earth, where you were, wondering what you were doing. More accurately, I was wondering whether you were dreaming about me, since you had another four hours until your normal waking time, and so I was not paying attention to the girls on their phones in hooker-chic clothes, or the women walking away from the wet market with their red plastic bags, or the concrete dust in the air as the high speed rail bridge with its bamboo exoskeleton heaved itself into life above me.

I sat in the taxi with the driver in the front seat, patient and impatient as only the Chinese can be, watching the things happening in the street while he had popped into the tiled building, with its darkened rust streaks from the window bars, to carry out his business. The baby on my lap, his heartbeat, his breathing twice as fast as mine even though he was asleep, it got me thinking about how all creatures have an allocated number of heartbeats, and a shrews heart beats as many times in its short life as a humans heart does in seventy years.

It annoyed me that he didn't even notice that my thoughts were elsewhere, that my heartbeat had started to thump to a different tune, to your tune, and not to his and he just saw me and the baby and thought all was well; it annoyed me but it was not something I could say to him, which is why I am telling you, even though I know you won't really understand.

Sometimes it is too much trouble to notice things.