The woman you are thinking of deserves better, but better than what? Every day she wakes up in a flood of sunlight. The sunlight shows that her lips are unnaturally red, that her cheeks are unnaturally pale, although what is natural and what unnatural varies with the season, and this life also has a season which melds with every other without division.

Every day she wakes up in the sunlight, and this sunlight is the most genuine and enduring thing in her life. She lies there, with her eyes half open, like a dream without detail. She is like a dreamer without detail; the heavy sunlight is an answer and an excuse, a gift and an apology. It represents the world, and it takes the world away; it is sufficient to everything.

Beyond the window there are boats, parks, streets, people, taxis, the things of city life, as well as the other things – boats, parks, streets, people, taxis – that are peculiar to one’s situation. Where the first ends and the second begins is conjecture, yet somewhere a line has to be drawn, all the same. The world does not dance on its own doorstep; there must be something else there, even if, taken together, all its parts only seem to make up itself. In reality there are two separate words, constituted from common pieces, but when all the reflections tumble together and return, they become the same.

It doesn’t matter - it’s incidental - that she takes the name she does, and that she has done the things she has. You are not her; you cannot conclude; and she is the thing she is in despite of anything you say, or anything anyone else might prove to make her so. It’s because of the grey days in which she was born, the smoky sunlight, the long empty springs like abandoned dreams – it’s because of all these things that your eyes have never met. Whatever you said would be like a language old to her, born as she has been in a time that does not age, that does not know about age, or ageing, or the art of growing old, that is amazed at itself for even existing.

The mist on the river. Eight thirty. The sound of a canal boat. Then that of a taxi, as it speeds across the bridge. The next day, no different. The mist on the river. Eight thirty. The sound of a canal boat. And her limbs, sprawled in the morning sun beyond the windows. In between was a day in which she descended from the fifty fourth floor where she lives to the street where she believes she lives, but within which, in fact, she has no existence at all. It is no more than a dream that punctuates two acts of sleeping; the accumulation of these days is like the soft shuffling of an infinite deck of cards.

She works in a shop on Forty Fifth and Broadway, in a city modelled upon the blueprint of a hundred other cities; she sells flowers, and she does not do it very well. This is not because she doesn’t care about what she does, although that’s true: she doesn’t care. In fact, it’s precisely because she doesn’t care about what she does; that’s the truth. But, all the same, this isn’t the reason, or rather, it isn’t fair to her for this to be the reason, because she has never realised she has an obligation to care; no one has explained to her that this is her life, that the fifteen years she will spend as a flower seller will be fifteen years of her life she will not have again, and therefore she should live that time with a certain reverence for the other things that flower selling takes away from her.

Again, not caring may even be an advantage, since a flower seller should show a certain decorum; no one wants her to take to heart the joys and tragedies we commemorate with flowers; no one expects her to ask about the sequel, if there is one, and neither is there space for a past in the neutral present of which she is steward, surrounded by perpetual gardens and the manufactured perfumes of out of season blooms. But at times her acquiescence is disarming, particularly if you yourself do not know exactly what you are looking for. You wander about the shop, picking up the same sprays, turning them round, examining them, putting them back in their buckets, looking at your watch, sighing heavily, wandering outside once more, inspecting the prices, reading them left to right, reading them top to bottom, going back inside, picking out the same things you picked out before, clearing your throat, catching her eye, while throughout she stands motionless at the till, as if your indecision were an entirely private thing that she knows is indecision by a kind of empathy, but which she is powerless to do anything about. The same thing when, now and again, people try to draw her out. It isn’t necessarily that they’re serious; perhaps they are; what does it matter? Most probably, they are simply being civil; they talk to her out of politeness, because one is allowed a certain familiarity with flower sellers and taxi drivers and hairdressers and musicians and beggars; each of these, in its own way, is a calling, and it is a part of that calling to have cheerful and inconsequential answers readily to hand. And so people often ask her where she hails from, and, instead of naming a district or a city, she says it’s a grey building, and it’s very bright. What can you say to that? And so they do, almost all of them. Wordlessly, they continue whatever it was they were doing, perhaps embarrassed by her response, perhaps a little sad. Such a pretty girl, to have so little to say for herself. And then there are the ones who nod and repeat “grey” and “bright”, and loiter in the shop too long, and never buy anything. You know what they are thinking; you know where that will end. And in that respect, she is neither more nor less promiscuous than the next person; she is exactly as virginal as she is, which is to say, in the technical sense, not at all, but in the metonymic sense – that of seeing the part and grasping some conception of the whole – completely. In the book of her life lovers are little more than dots of a different sex, signalling the end of sentences that never really interested her anyway.

“Why don’t you choose something for me?” you say, and, in response, she answers: “Well … Do you like red?”

You try again: “Would you pick red?” She looks at you, not understanding the connection.

“Blue, then,” she says: “Lots of people like blue.”

“You’re fond of blue, are you?”

Again, she looks at you quizzically, sensing the impediment, but unable to see exactly what it is.

“Blue,” she concludes definitively.

And later someone else asks her, in another context, in another place: “Do you like this?” And she says: “I don’t know.”

“What would it take to make you know?”

“I don’t know.”

But really the question should be: what would it mean for her to know? What would it add? Is it so wrong for her to live in the sunlight dividing two kinds of cataleptic world? We all want to add something; none of us wants to leave her like this, because if this is how one woman spends her life, then what of our own? Are our own lives so reassuringly directed that hers is inconceivable? If not, what is the sympathy we share, but our own sense of failure, our own sense of selling flowers, without having made a choice, without knowing what we want, and without knowing when things are going to end? But, like her, could it help us in the slightest to know? Could there be any other response than that quizzical look, acknowledging a question out of place, constructed out of pauses, torn to pieces by a stranger, reassembled by a child, directed to a god with broken ears?