Indiscreet.

Outside it is cold in the mornings but when I wake up and look, all I see is a wide swatch of sunlight that is laying over everything. It even manages to make it through the manmade canyons of reflective glass and red stained bricks to come through my window and cover my face. My face is turned towards the window and when I open my eyes every morning, if it is sunny outside I wonder if perhaps I am dead, and if this is what heaven is supposed to be - cold and white, starkly dangerous and yet soothing to the touch. It reminds me of holding a jellyfish through a rubber glove, where nematocysts are unavailable for comment but the soft and wavy motions travel from fingertips to the palm of my hand.

The walk towards Fell's Point is thick with the smell of seawater, and it cuts further towards the back of the throat in dry winter air. The distance is dotted by people in various levels of exertion, and their words echo across the point while their mouths exhume thick slabs of steam that trail behind them like grey and fibrous scarves. I walk and breathe quietly. Sometimes I worry that when I am breathing out and steam rises, I am losing part of myself that I can't recall ever having had. It is a short and childish fear but it hits so quickly that I am really afraid, very much afraid until I remember that I am no longer a child. I am not afraid of the dark anymore...secretly I still fear the amorphous mass of shape that is the evening. I think I always will.

I recall during my walk that this world is really a million worlds, that the world I am in is not the one that you live in, or the one that the girl walking past me lives in. All of us have our different worlds and all of us can almost touch the others around us when we kiss or laugh, or hug to share warmth. A girl told me about penguins and I wonder if perhaps we are like them in more ways that we like to imagine - except that they are better dressed. In an existence where death remains so close, laying next to them in sleep like a deposed lover, understanding comes much sooner. They understand that everything changes so quickly that it seems like nothing has changed at all, and they are dressed for the occasion. No matter how hard we try, we never will know another person or their world - we can approximate it but that remains the best that we can ever do. A friend of mine is colorblind and he will never know the difference between red and green. That fact shocked me, but it shocked me more that I did not pity him in any way - I simply felt jealousy, clear and smooth jealousy for a person whose world was that much easier to understand. In a perfect world everything is the same color and when we close our eyes we see it, glorious and triumphant, the silver color of trumpets in the sky.

I stand at the end of the point and I look across the water at tall ships and for once I think that perhaps the sea is nothing but a marble in a pond, and that we have thrown it there.

-Rich though we remembered it didn't matter in the slightest