project yourself through the eyes of a chain-smoker. he tastes cigarette matches and drinks staled coffee but eats nothing else. when he lies, feel your empathetic fingers curl around the throat of his soul. when he says he want to die, feel the birds in your chest tremble. when he stumbles through time, through city streets, dead hallways—watch him go. he is asking everyone for innocence. he remembers the days when the sun was bright, and the museum was cold, and there was a frail, freckled hand clutching at the blood in his washed-out skin. but today he cannot buy anything because his pockets are only full of ashen questions—the kind all the quiet people burn away in their loud, loud lives. they keep spinning and he can’t make it to the end of the street.

your heart hurts. watch him ask for innocence back and whisper, to yourself, “i want it too.” fight over it. you know you will both lose. his last words are ink. he’s sick. he never had it. you will go to war with the pavement. it will slip. simmer. bleed. fall.

no one has it. it died.