"Midnight" Part 4

I haven't seen the stars in almost two years.

30th street, I sigh. I lift my eyes and gaze upward into a cloud-covered blackness carried by city lights and sounds. I probably look lost and foolish walking down the sidewalk with my head craned back, staring toward a dismal heaven. Big cities aren't meant for stargazing. It's one of the many sacrifices, I guess. I lost a sense of 

beauty when I moved here.

Don't get me wrong. I enjoy the city. The lights, the sounds, the speed; It's a sensory symphony of modern man. There's always something going on, even at 3 a.m.

Especially at 3 a.m.

But I come from a natural place—nothing like this chaotically organized, colossal maze of concrete and steel. There are mountains and trees where I'm from. Springtime is explosive—a proverbial picture of God speaking. Summer is thick and full of activity. Autumn is Earth splashing paint across the hillside. Winter is pure. The stars are infinite.

It's true. I counted, once. 

But as I grew older, I ceased to see the beauty. It's like staring at the same point for too long without blinking. The center blackens until all that remains is the outer-rim.

Try it sometime. 

In the end, I needed to blink. I needed to experience the world outside my own. I didn't want to fade through life like everybody else. So, I moved here. 

A week afterward, I met her.

29th street. A low rumble of thunder penetrates from somewhere far above. A few drops of dying rain struggle toward the earth.

Actually, I ran into her…literally. 

It was just outside of a convenient store on a Sunday afternoon around 2:30. She was carrying chocolate, and I was jogging around the corner. She was wearing glasses, and I was wearing headphones.  She was putting change in her purse, and I was looking the other way. Not on purpose, of course. I thought I heard a dog barking behind me. We converged in front of the double-glass doors outside of the store and tumbled over each other onto the city-stained sidewalk.

We were best friends after that.

28th street, I glance upward. The clouds are beginning to break.

However, somewhere between me helping her up from the littered concrete and my most recent birthday, like these worn-out Nike sneakers, everything fell apart. 

Or something fell apart, and the rest followed.

In fact, it reminds me of Jenga, the game where you stack the wooden blocks into a miniature Leaning Tower of Pisa and then slide individual blocks out one by one until it collapses into a laughable mess that the loser is left privileged to clean up. Or it reminds me of this homeless man stretched out across the bus stop bench. Perhaps he had an organized, happy life once-upon-a-time, a life that made sense. But one by one, pieces were shoved out of place until the whole of it came crashing down and left him lying here in a cluttered pile of unintentional, circumstantial consequence.

27th street. The traffic light flickers sporadically above me.

Whatever it reminds me of, my heart is a suffering heap of flesh and emotion, and I'm the loser left to clean up.

And I have no idea where to begin