Sarah stared at the old broom propped in the corner of her high-rise apartment. Dust motes danced in the afternoon light streaming through floor-to-ceiling windows, catching her wandering attention. How long had that broom been there? A week? A year? Time felt fluid lately.
“You should really get a vacuum cleaner,” Michael had said during his last visit, eyeing the worn bristles with mild disdain. But she liked her ordinary broom, appreciated its quiet persistence, its humble reliability. Unlike people. Unlike Michael.
The city hummed twenty stories below. Sarah pressed her forehead against the cool glass, watching tiny figures scurrying between shadows of looming buildings. All those lives intersecting, overlapping, drifting apart. Like quantum particles in an urban soup.
Her phone buzzed. A text from Michael: Coffee today?
The broom watched silently from its corner as memories flooded her consciousness - stolen kisses in rain-slicked alleys, heated arguments over cold lattes, meaningful glances that meant nothing at all.
“What do you think?” she asked the broom. Its wooden handle gleamed dully in response. She imagined Virginia Woolf would have appreciated the profound ordinariness of this moment - a woman, a broom, the weight of unspoken words.
Sorry, busy with work, she typed back. Delete. Not today. Delete. I don’t think we should. Delete.
The city lights were coming alive now, a constellation of human persistence. Sarah picked up the broom and began sweeping, each stroke a meditation. Dust and debris gathered in neat piles - fragments of days, weeks, relationships that never quite crystallized into something solid.
Her phone buzzed again: I miss you.
The broom’s bristles whispered against hardwood floors. She thought about responding, about crafting the perfect phrase to capture this peculiar ache of almost-love. But sometimes silence said everything.
In the gathering dusk, Sarah swept away the remains of the day. The broom moved with practiced grace, each sweep bringing order to chaos, if only temporarily. Tomorrow new dust would settle. Tomorrow the city would surge on. Tomorrow Michael would text someone else.
The ordinary broom stood witness to it all, asking nothing, promising nothing. Sarah ran her fingers along its worn handle, feeling the smooth patches where countless hands had gripped before. How many stories had this simple tool swept through? How many almost-loves?
Outside her windows, the city sparkled like broken glass. Sarah set the broom back in its corner and watched shadows lengthen across her floor. Her phone remained silent now. The moment had passed, like so many before it.
In the space between what could have been and what was, she found a strange peace. The broom’s silhouette stretched long against the wall - a quiet companion in the art of letting go, of accepting the beauty in things that end before they truly begin.