There’s a green spot in the city. If you were a bird, and you were riding on the curling winds that seeped and sucked out of the skyscrapers—if you were a bird you would be flying through colors—the colors of granite, steel, brick and concrete. If you were a bird flying through the city, you would fly by the color of glass—the color of glass is the color of you... and you may fight the urge to meet yourself in an endless tinted sky in the glass high-rise window, but you see the green spot. And if you were a bird, and your feet grew tired of gripping and laying flat on hot concrete—or the metal chain link of lines drawn by surveyors and neighbors... and the pulse in the electrical cable makes you nervous and sways too much in the wind—when you see that green spot, you surrender to gravity, and you find your tree.

There are lots of trees in the green spot. Some oaks are huge and as old as the city’s Indian name. There are pines... and elms that have survived the blight to stretch out curious arms, and with small dark green fingers the elms tickle the bones of the breeze. You can hear the winds exhausting laughter in between the twisting of those determined fingers. If you were a bird, you would land, thankful for the spring of a branch... and the ants military like precision march down the limb you are on.

If you were a bird, this would be happiness to you. This green spot in gray is just a place, and for the moment it is yours.

If you were a man and you had been walking the concrete back of the microcosm of the city—you would still walk past colors—granite, steel, brick and the concrete would disappear underneath your feet with each step, and each step you would move closer to that green spot. The colors of glass would not be that endless sky, and you would not be tempted to go into it—but you would see yourself, walking, or stopping and considering how the blurs walking all around, and behind you—see you. Buildings have eyes, and they capture you in their iris, you blink and for just a moment you are not reflection—you have taken up that black space in the pupil of that building, and for the tiniest second you become part of the steel skeleton, nerves run with wire, flesh riveted together, you have been put together by the hands of a mason, and you will cure in the sun and grow stronger. But that’s just that moment, and in the time it takes you to make more concrete disappear beneath your feet—the building has seen you, taken you in, and you are forgotten as it’s endless eye takes in another.

The green spot grows closer.

There is something to be said of cloud watching. It may be considered a tool of the imagination for children with nothing better to do, to lay down their backs in moist and itchy grasses and point, and never see what the other person is seeing.

“That’s an elephant.”

The other person, the other child never sees the elephant.

“That’s a swan.”

It is a child’s game. Because children do not have expectations for the clouds—because the clouds simply are. The just roll by in the sky propelled by some mysterious mechanism—God’s breath shushing the clouds along—and if you raise your hand just right in front of your eye—you can