From the top, I saw the line between the green of the trees and the grey of the sky; I saw other things, and I heard the scurrying of cars below, but did not notice any of it. I did not even notice the line between the green of the trees and the grey of the sky. But I remembered – for no reason I can recall – how much I see and how little I notice, and I missed the way some things used to be and I started noticing. [I did this by remembering what it felt like to notice, and that made me feel that way, and that made me notice; or rather, that was noticing.] First the old brick warehouse that stood only a few blocks in front of the foot hills. It was filled with offices now. I could remember an enormous broken window on the side of that building, three stories above me on Washington Street. It was daytime, wet and cold, like today but wetter. Rain was falling in large drops off the glass shards that remained in the frame. I had never been in Michigan before that day. That was a year ago. Shit, more than that.

I was still noticing. The roads I could see seemed, if I let it happen, like they were right there at arm’s reach, the way they would be if they were on TV, except when you touched the screen you were touching the real thing, not just a picture. The hills made me miss Pittsburgh. I missed everything about Pittsburgh. I heard a car coming up from the seventh level, and I heard it pass right behind me. I was not going to turn around to look at it. If it’s the manager, fuck it. There’s more jobs where this came from. More places, too.

#

My mornings are like this: Right after I wake up, I put on a pair of black pants, the company shirt and the company jacket, and my boots. I come out of my house and it is cold out. I have brought my bike; I get on and start my ride down the hill. When the cold wind starts blasting it gets all in my eyes and they water, so much that at the bottom of the hill I have tears hanging from my jaw. This happens to me every morning when I go to work. It doesn’t hurt.

#

“Of course I’m going to call you,” she said. She said, “I’m not going to just drop you like a piece of … shit.” I remember when she said she wanted to know me for the rest of her life.

#

On my way down to the ground floor, between a pair of adjacent cars, I saw something purple and plastic on the concrete. I held the broom and dust pan in front of me so as to fit between the cars, and from above I could see the thing was a baby’s pacifier. I wasn’t sure I wanted to throw it away. Maybe the family would come back and find it, and take it home and clean it, despite the ambient odor of oil and cigarette butts. I left it there. I can get it tomorrow. (The baby will cry anyway. Babies cry.)

#

I was on a kind of date with this other girl. Last month sometime. We had met at the coffee place next to the parking structure, and we talked for nearly an hour. She was a student at the university, so probably too young for me. She had beautiful blue eyes that looked French; she looked French altogether, and she was short, which I like. And she had an exceptionally sexy voice. I left the place at the end of my break, but she came to find me when I got off work; she found me to give me her phone number. We had a strange date one night, where I was shy and she was drunk, and after that I called her and she didn’t call me back. Months later we ran into each other again, and we ended up at her house. No electricity; nothing but cold and dark and the rain outside and her bed where we had to touch to be warm.In the morning – after we made out and didn’t have sex, and after she told me she didn’t want to date me – we went to a diner for breakfast. I let her choose, and she chose my least favorite place in town. I used to sit in there drinking bad coffee, wishing I were in a real diner on the coast somewhere. Seattle, maybe. Then I stopped going.

The girl and I started talking, about politics or philosophy; whatever you call the way you think things should be. She’s majoring in one of those save-the-world subjects, like environmental something. She had all those opinions, like how bad war was and the death penalty, and all those other ways that people kill and maim each other. That kind of person, they think that all there is to life is avoiding getting hurt. I said there were things that were worse than violence. Like what, she said. Despair, I said. She told me she thought violence was worse than despair.