We stood on the ninth floor

Along the large, open hall

ran a row of high

windows

and a glass door opened on a balcony

that ran the full width of the high-rise,

with a view across town

and the Baltic bay beyond

We were alone out there,

where doctors and nurses

and a few cancer patients

would stand on sunny days,

smoking

She was admitted for an early abortion

She was just eighteen, I was twenty-seven

She was dressed in a hospital nightgown

She touched me “there”,

I grabbed her warm ass inside her panties

with my right hand;

her left hand unzipping my trousers,

liberating my trigger-happy dick,

grabbing hold of it with her left hand,

starting to pull it expediently,

making the load sprinkle off with force;

touch-down a couple of meters away

on the stone floor

The view swayed and my knees trembled

as I retracted my finger out of her ass

and she expressed her satisfaction

at having, for the first time,

actually witnessed the coming and going like that!

More than half a century later

I can still feel the excitement, looking back on the event,

having just closed Juhani Pallasmaa's book

“The Eye of the Skin”, on architecture,

fully appreciating the haptic quality

of good architecture;

the door handle being the handshake of the building,

myself sleepy after speedily handling the situation,

as a Gripen jet fighter blows by up above

drawing the outer perimeter of present perception

as I remain in full recall

of the desolate atmosphere of the empty

ninth floor hospital hall

of the beginning of this text,

where,

a few years before this space got its erotic denomination,

and I was working as an orderly

at the nearby psychiatric clinic,

a female French-Swedish schizophrenic violinist, also eighteen,

who was one of eight patients under my practical, daily care,

jumped off the balcony and killed herself,

on one of my days off