Looking down at his thick gold, diamond-studded watch with tired eyes, he understands the silver hands and thinks patiently downward.
A man with no real chance–not really.
Thin, pale, 50, balding, unmarried, childless, partnerless, he keeps in touch with a few old friends and relatives, but his mouth is dry and head shrouded in a hazy thud. He smokes the same cigarettes that he set great hopes upon in his early twenties. Watch him shuffle aimless over to the tall windowframe and, entering into the chill near the pane, gaze–his green-tatooed arms crossed over the white V-neck T-shirt–down at the street.
He is tired. His life has been like one long day that gradually wears an energetic family man working man pub regular family man loverboy completely out. I can’t really hope for his future. The green-tinted visor of his hat obscures his eyes as it points down towards Columbus Circle fully occupied in the noonday summer sun.
They say that the trick of the wise is to really believe that other people experience reality from the inside-out just like you do. Perhaps he is trying to wrap his mind and heart around that insight, but mostly he just wishes vaguely for a cigarette and the health to enjoy it. Not that he’s sick–just tired, very tired, like a piece of chalk worn down to a tiny nub on the sidewalk so that the fingers holding it start to get a little sore with the drawing, which–for reasons unknown (it isn’t as if they are drawing anything memorable)–will not stop drawing.
He tries to rally: He thinks of a nice cool glass of fresh brewed iced tea with a full quarter lemon and the ice cubes clinking while the sun lights the whole cylinder to a nice bright redwood. In vain! In vain. The trick that he always figured he’d be catching hold of pretty soon, and which he’d use to vault himself over the grand canyon never showed. For thirty years now, he’s felt a slight confusion: where is the grandeur that he’s just about to grasp, the victory he’s felt prickling on his skin since as far as he can recall–all the way back to when he tramped through the dry leaves, beneath the dry, shaggy-barked pines, looking for fallen branches to stack together for a fort, a great fort, an awesome fort, a fort that surely would–. What was the fort supposed to do?

AMW / BW