Every breath is a yawn.  

In my sleep I have dreams about sleeping.  

I’ll catch someone looking to see if I’m looking.  Fuck I hate games.  

I know I’m an adult because I’m worried about not having enough time left to take care of stuff before I buy the farm.  

I admit that I sometimes think about settling down and trying the wife-and-kids thing.  

 

I can’t even imagine that, Kit says breathlessly between pulls.  

But it’s strange to me too.  

 

I guess a part of me – a very small part – doesn’t want to miss out.  And I’m not convinced it’s all roses, but the way the light might hit from time to time seems pretty enough.  

Stretched too thin.  I get way too fucking high most nights.  Feeling like I’ve let myself go.  

Catching an unkempt reflection in the grimy window of a subway car.  That night I shave my head again, for the first time in many months.

Then I wake up early and lift weights.  

 

Lose a little more, I think to myself.  Carved and hacked to perfection. Sleeping away my days in a cloud of smoke.  

 

Calm up there.  

A guy I know who lives in the county and makes bank as a doctor complains about delays.  

If I delayed Very Specific Medicine to my patients, do you think they’d like it?  

It’s a great business model, I tell him.  When they finally get it, they’ll be more than happy to pay for it.  

They’d be dead!

So what do you care?  They’re not sick anymore.  

True, he admits.  

Underground beneath Lower Manhattan, I’ll trade glances with a stranger.  

Like tunnel scenery, something beautiful glimpsed in the window between the quickest two seconds.  An ephemeral twist of the neck, a body that twitches and contorts like smoke.  

Shouting body language.  

Gone forever.  No knowing. In a sea of 8,600,000 people.  

And others passing through, for a week or a day.  A few hours of overlap.

 

“So many walks of life,” she says.  

“There’s only one walk of life,” I want to shoot back.  But I stop talking to her after that. And let her sink into memory.  Blotted and burned.  

Michaela was always better than me.  The kind of person who seemed to be too beautiful for her surroundings.  You just knew she belonged with someone important, or rich, or, well, just better.  

Bitter and scathed when it wasn’t you.  And it hardened your heart against some things, after that.  

Her older sister probably thought more of me than she did.  I wonder where Rachel is now.