I feel tired.

The back of my neck stretches with exhaustion. I look into the mirror, and dark brown eyes stare numbly through layers of folded skin into my own weary eyes. My eyebrows are scrunched together. I look worried, I notice. I focus hazily for a moment on releasing the tension in my eyebrows, and eventually they slip down. I blink. They slide right back up. I sigh and look at the clock. It is five o’clock now, the time when the city’s grey loneliness is joined by the reds and blues of the sun. From the window, I can see the towers of apartment buildings, one after the other, right along the skyscrapers where the rich and educated roam. I glance at the papers on my desk, half mutilated with my scribblings of future stories to be told, and I wonder whether the gap between the apartment buildings and the skyscrapers will ever be bridged, and by whom. Maybe by me, although from my vantage point that gap is at once too big and too small.

The sun’s tallest rays stretch just above the tallest apartment building, clashing with the yellow lights still on in some of the windows. I glance at one, and I can see a woman, her head bent over, knitting a cap while a toddler fondles her feet. Her hands move rhythmically and methodically, allowing her to sigh without disrupting her work. It is early, but she must work so that the cap will be ready for the customers at today’s market, the teens who come rolling in, waving their money and carefully selecting their vendors with all the time in the world. The woman stops to gently push the toddler to the side, and then looks out the window and tries to rest. Can she feel me watching her? Can she see the sun, shining upon her window, merging with the dim light in her crammed room? Does she want what I want? I feel the answer is yes.

A sparrow suddenly flutters just past the tip of my nose. I would flinch, but it takes too much energy to do so. The wind that lags ever so slightly behind it gathers up my papers in an affectionate embrace, and before I am aware, every last paper has blown out the window, off the balcony, and into the cool New York air.

I watch them flutter desperately in the air, past the woman at the window, past the other lights that were on through the night and are now flickering on. They are at the mercy of the wind now, and my poor and pitiful body can do little now to retrieve them. One paper finds itself, settled on the corner of the street, where a grey bus roars by to push it further along once more. It catches in a young teenage boy’s bag of freshly bought clothes. “Blind skyscrapers,” it starts…
Blind skyscrapers use
Their full right to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man

It says…