Today she texts me, requests my company with her at the Modern Art museum downtown. Shrug on a coat, out into the winter air.

It is biting cold and left unchaperoned, my hands lead themselves to burrow into the down of my jacket pocket, where they fiddle with themselves for heat. The air tucks pale and the sun shirks the southern hills that flank the bay, framing the sky with its misdirected rays, and it makes my shadow long and light.
I think about what she said to me. How she rubbed her eyes when she stared deep into the sun between the trees, how she said it still left its mark in her vision even when we made our ways home.

And yet, why couldn’t I bear to look?

In and out of rowhouse shadows, I watch my own blink between the canopy of flaking, piebald birch trees that line the sidewalk. As I walk it lives and dies between the flickering leaves, tucked behind a natural shade--still, soon guided with my silent sure-step onward into that inanimate skyline, comes scarce to return to itself only in moments of sunny unobstruction—few and far between, the closer I get to downtown. At times I expect it to appear in one place, only to be surprised by its unpredictability—the way it stretches itself in angular relief, with supernatural zeal, to situate itself within the light; beyond any control or command.

Yet beyond the street an army of distorted silhouettes stilt themselves across the glass facades of unknown offices, dancing and flickering, painting the caving walls with unmistakable life. They march obedient to the cacophonous wanderings of city folk, those unspoken kin, an army of unarticulated fuzzy forms smeared across and in the spears of metal thrusting angry, jealous, into the sky—sapping the light, encumbering the grand city with their heavy towering darkness, seeping the day’s illuminating rays of their heat and majesty.

And yet, these floating individuals continue in lock-step, filled with indescribable finality, conveying their dripping, sliding doppelgangers across a foliate of empty reflective facades— with each purposed footfall further submitting their spectral shadow to the naked inundation of light—to exclaim to the sun their own simple, unpopular, infinitesimal form from which they receive their hostage.

Unnoticed, unaware, unknown; I stare up and watch, wonder, thought—my shadow splays itself hidden in the ****-soaked earth, full of trash and discarded waste, not worthy or willing to present itself in the innumerable fold of people—relegates itself to the cool undertone of shadowed street, invisible and diffused rather imperceptively into the homogeneous grey of asphalt.

By the time I reach our meeting place, I naught distinguish my own pendulous shadow from the forest of dead steel spires that propped their long coats across the wintered streets.