And now that there’s time, you sit by the window and wonder why you didn’t try harder.

You didn’t like that year. Months falling like papers down the chute, press the button, maybe the fire will warm you.
You wonder what changed you.
Patrick died. Yes, that must have been the reason.
You sit licking gray lips near the window’s edge, stare into a city that’s not your own, planes carve great slices into the sky, bleed clouds, bleed.

You grip the edge with tightened fingers.

You rented this apartment three weeks from the Day. The Day the city coughed two towers of black smoke and vomited at its own reflection in the Hudson.
Then anger thudded through its veins and cars smeared lights onto gum-speckled sidewalks but no one was chewing anymore. They didn’t have time for that.

Blame the other people, they said. We are not ugly. Beauty comes from the West, with presidents and crosses and English flowing from our mouths.
Save face, they said. But not the covered face.
Our city’s dying.

Between the subway vibrations, you can hear the sound of bombs echoing, as we kill other places, other buildings, other fictional worlds.
Smoke begets smoke.

Your brother died, oh yes, bullets threw him into bushes, bloody brambles, pebbles still stuck in his shoe.
Or maybe it was the accident, like you were told, two army vans on a long stretch of dark road that suddenly blazed with red and orange, and heat extinguishes pain before the shivering notes of a scream can make themselves heard.

He might have been alright if he had survived the war. He might have forgotten it.
But you know better.
He might have returned coughing to your mother’s house, to sit on the back porch with his boots still on, copying tax forms from one notebook to another so you would have a back up just in case.
And when the tax forms were done, maybe he would have looked long and empty at the silent rooms, drawing dust from their corners, before another cough would split him down the middle at his seam and he would double up, bringing up white stuff that looked like cotton.
Maybe he would have gone on, just coughing and breathing, forgetting about the curling smoke from the houses he set on fire, or the shabby clothes he flung in an arc from the broken drawers, or the dead children with their worn blue mittens and their g****** tiny shoes, screaming from their graves that they are real.
But you know better.

Patrick died. Yes, he must have been the reason. The reason you stopped trying, the reason you coughed at the feel of your own breath in your lungs, at the sight of the buildings across the water, coughed at newspapers and radio stories.
City Kid.

No. No. Patrick must’ve been the reason.

You stopped trying to run for subways, to count the change, make the light. Work, and classes, and tying shoes. You tripped in the middle of a deserted street and landed on your back, stared past the buildings into the sky, saw red bleeding into the white and blue.

And then some nights it would break, you would feel it, laying your head down on the table and crying with relief, until the radio would come on in the apartment next door, seeping through the walls, crackling with the spitting words
And the fear.

You wheeled through streets, cold hands, shoved in pockets, walk through the park in December, wonder why there are no Christmas lights on this year, then remember.
Pigeons eat out of the Chinese food cartons, the city is torn with whispers.

But it must’ve been Patrick.
It must’ve been Patrick.

Your city fell and faded and something else emerged again, and now, walking through the haunted streets you see all of it, all of it, but still continue, the birds wheel through shivering parking lots, you notice less and less, cracked gray lips you smear with Chapstick, and maybe in a few years, you’ll forget and sit by the window and wonder why you didn’t try harder.