He looks up from this novel he is reading over a rare leisurely dinner, which threads meditations on painting (or more generally art and the impulse that propels art, that of love) with the mystery of a murder. And discovers that his gaze is resting upon the face of a woman, less than a foot away, over the low wooden wall that splits his row of seats from hers', in this noisy restaurant.

Startlingly this face seems to contain the essence of the other face - same brow and same eyelashes - he had been trying to summon all day today. Why you ask? Perhaps because it was because the memory of this face's twin - now less hazy - reading to him a poem, in the original language of this novel he had been gnawing for ten to fifteen minutes before sleep for the past week, which hovering over his day like the overcast sky. Perhaps because he has been hoping for days that he can go, if only for a while, to that place, that crevice from which words last flowed.

They say the body tears up the eye to protect it from its own sadness yet he can't tear up now, with words if not water, as he did just recently, in this winter, when for the briefest sequence of days he needed words to hold intact the warmth that was always under his palms. And now this face - now nothing more than just the shadow of that other face summoned from memory's archive, and this line he just read from the book open at the table:

"For if a lover's face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home."

Unable to sit still any longer, he picks up this book, his dinner half eaten - food hasn't had much taste for days anyways - tips heavily on the bill presented by the congenially cheerful waitress, and walks out into a city besieged by a heavy snowfall, wondering if this world is still his home. He is thankful that he is dressed like a crow, in all black; this way none would notice how his just reopened wounds bleed, not unless they looked down at the snow, and saw his disappearing footsteps briefly outlined in red.