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