Things No One Thanks

At three a.m. I get up for water, bare feet on cold tile, one hand still feeling for the bedroom switch. The apartment hallway is lit, as it is every night. I stand and look at the round bulb on the ceiling for a while. I have lived here seven years, and not once have I thought about it.

The poem below was written right there, with a thumb, on a phone screen that hadn't gone dark yet. It isn't telling you to be more grateful. Someone who is tired doesn't need one more task, which is remembering to thank a light bulb.

The hallway light on the third floor
has been on since I fell asleep
and will be till I wake.
Nobody has ever said
one word to it.

The rice cooker clicks off
while I'm still in the shower.
Fifteen minutes later
the rice is warm,
and no one asks why.

Five a.m.,
a bamboo broom on the asphalt.
I hear it through my sleep.
By the time I open the door, the alley is clean
as if no one had been there.

The float switch in the water tank on the roof
rises and the pump stops, sinks and the pump starts.
It has never known
how many people live here,
or when we shower.

I'm not telling anyone to say thank you.
It's only that tonight,
reaching for the switch,
I pause for one beat.

It stays on.
I go to sleep.

The street sweeper in the third stanza is called Nở. I know because her name is stitched on her work vest. I have never talked to her. Some mornings I open the door just as she passes, I nod, she nods back, and that's all. The word thank you, though, I dropped somewhere along the way a long time ago. Part of this poem is me picking that nod back up.

The next evening my daughter, who is nine, found me staring at the rice cooker as it clicked off.

"Dad, what are you doing?"

"Thanking it."

"It can't hear you."

"I know."

She shrugged and went to get a bowl. I stood a little longer, steam rising against my face, feeling slightly ridiculous. I kept that ridiculous feeling.

The things in the poem share one trait: you only think of them when they break. The light goes out and you look up, the water doesn't reach the tank and you ask why. I don't think thanks here is a ritual, or a debt owed to an object. For me it's only a moment of noticing. Noticing that some things run all the time and I never counted them.