Streets are long and narrow here, never flat and leveled. My feet trudge along on its surfaces, a light umbrella in my closed fist. The sky is so blue above me.

I see a tree. It’s tall, spidery-like. I’m not even sure of its species; I never really paid attention to scientific names or diagrams. But to me, it’s a pine tree.

My neck hurts from the way I crane my head to look at its tip, the last sprig atop its long body. I imagine balancing on top of it with one foot, my back against the clouds, the sun dripping on my shoulders. That’s what a bird must feel like.

I pull back and take a panoramic view, look at the immense profoundness before my aching little body, in the many different ways I live. How the sky stretches and the earth moves. It makes me feel small, living within a fraction of what life is.

Distant muffled sounds ring and bring me back to concrete. I walk past houses, where people sleep and drink and dance. They must be sweating into their soft cotton sheets as they nap, dreaming. In the space between curb and road, I watch as soap spills and joins itself into the murky, still water before it. White tendrils of chemical clouds dissolve, the gray asphalt soaking wet.

I imagine again, this time myself as someone else, somewhere else. A different umbrella in my hand, maybe much heavier, maybe for rain rather than sun. My singular self here longing for a different life there, while the person in place of me there is simultaneously grieving for the life I have here. By extension, I am grieving the present. Why do I do this? I have it right here, right now, right this instant.

I hear a gate open, a man shutting close the trunk of a car. A woman watering her red and orange zinnias. I look up again and feel the slight touch of the wind on my brown skin. It must be telling me to stay, to look, to be enraptured by the life around me. No need to grieve, it must say. You are alive, you are here. This is the place you ought to be.