Boots, but only one sock and it was coming apart, and the faded red backpack — thank goodness. A matted black Old Navy hoodie that had bled to gray over the years, one pair of jeans with a threadbare hole on the left side of my ass, and boxers that were unusable even for me that I would soon leave behind like my last shirt. They didn’t leave me with much. It was hard to remember, every needle of light wanted to suck the life right out of me and I felt as dry as the evening news except for the damp spot on the front of my jeans running down my right leg. Dried blood caked over the dirt on my hands masking the split flesh in crimson warpaint. As I looked around I caught my shadow beside the crude ‘PISS HERE’ spraypainted on the opposite side of the alley, hair matted into a handle they had used to drag me across the concrete. The ground was littered with prismatic shards of embedded glass - probably where the blood came from - a graveyard of broken beer bottles peppered with the stains of decades of spilled bodily fluids. Everything hurt, nothing new. I couldn’t imagine how I must have smelled.

	It was impossible to remember when this all started or even how old I was today, it must have been decades ago that I slipped into that crack in the sidewalk like every other piece of litter. Discarded, forgotten, trampled. I drank to forget and was successful at that. What I do remember is overwhelming shame and a guilt that dug deep enough to bury me in a mile of dirt and worms. Where most have an angel and devil my shoulders were governed by these twin beasts of regret. I deserved what they had done.

	I pushed the Earth away in a labored attempt to rise, almost forgetting the slow burn of malnutrition which had pecked away at me throughout the years. Not much left but a skeleton. Brick sprung forth from the pavement in every direction and gave way to tenements and slums which blocked out the sky, some taller than others like jagged mountain peaks. These walls were my prison. I could wander for hours in any direction and only find more of them lacing endless corridors of tar and rubber, an urban quicksand that seemed to grab only myself and those like me. I walked north.

	The hardest part was the feeling of a thousand gazes that couldn’t see you. Eye contact was always averted, sometimes barricaded with a newspaper or a fake phone call. I no longer used my voice enough to feel comfortable speaking, and even if I did I would never find an ear. I missed my family. I missed my daughters, my wife and our dog, but I couldn’t bear to say their names anymore - even to myself. I couldn’t even say my own name anymore, it had been stripped from me along with every other shred of humanity I once clung so desperately to. I was barely one of them anymore, shifted and morphed into a Kafka-esque cockroach fluttering beneath busy feet on worn pavement, stopping to drink from spit-stains and judging the safety of a place by the amount of ancient blood dried into the sidewalk. I was fearless and faced my retribution without flinching.

	I made my way to a park nearby, one of the little ones with enough trees rung around the outside to block out the city, the last slice of nature pie this diner would ever bake. Verdant late-summer greens flooded my vision, the benches already preparing to endure winter by bundling up under thin blankets of early-fallen leaves. These would soon be my beds, my pillows, and the fingers to stroke my own in the dead of night, reminding me that I’m not alone. I took a seat on a rotting wooden bench, noticing the initials carved into the backrest. “N.T.” and “V.T.” etched on either side of a larger “1993”.

	I sat beside the carving and closed my eyes, kicking unenthusiastically at little piles of leaves underfoot. The park used to be full of laughing children. I remember a hot day with my daughter, we joked about death by heatstroke - a punchline that ended up being too symbolic of reality. I caught myself remembering and fought to forget. I opened my eyes to find that the park didn’t look like it once did, realizing now just how many names had been spraypainted on tree trunks, the army of discarded papers and napkins that failed to find a trash can, little pieces of broken beer bottles, syringe caps and tarnished, roasted spoons. This is just what had happened to my memories, they shifted into abandoned ghost-towns filled with the footprints and impressions of love but none of the actual substance. A little teaser to remind me of what I had lost. My focus shifted to the towers of leaves my feet toppled, it felt like it took more effort than toppling the whole rest of my life - at least I was aware I was doing it. I knew what I was doing this time.

	As my boots plowed away at the coat of various shades of brown and green I noticed one green apart from the rest, magnetic and different. Instinctively, my hands reached for the floor to brush away the debris and to pocket the treasure beneath the fallen X - a crisp one-hundred dollar bill that had run away from home and found its way to the streets, like the rest of us. Its straight edges showed that it hadn’t faced the familiar erosion yet, not dulled down by the humdrum and the howling winds of wages and mortgages. There was something fearful about finding so much money in one place. It was hard to keep secrets on the street and if I wasn’t careful a prize like this could be my death. I rose immediately as it slipped into my pocket - making sure that it was the one without a hole. There was a diner down the street and I could afford to order for once.

	The exterior of the diner was sickly sunbleached red plastered in signs that hadn’t been updated in 60 years. There was a layer of shredded fliers two inches deep baked across the square pan of the front window and the name of the place was long faded from both the sign and memory, but it was obviously recognizable as one of those old ‘50s diners that was once probably something special. The kind that would show up in a famous painting, where whimsical nobodies like me would dream of sitting to watch yellow lights dance through the abyss of night. I was assaulted as soon as I walked through the door.

	“Hey— the free lunch was yesterday! Get out!” We had never met, but the waitress was short with me, she swatted her dirty rag in my direction as she yelled. She was young, but her face was painted with 40 years of hard labor across the canvas of a crooked nose.

	“I’m a paying customer today!” I waved the bill around briefly as I spoke. My voice choked itself free of my throat with unnatural inflections from lack of use, cracking and splintering into embarrassing shards of inhumanity. The waitress disappeared into the kitchen and I could just barely see her arguing with her manager, scowl not disappearing as she begrudgingly approached my booth.

	“If you don’t pay, the police will be picking your ass up. I’ve fallen for this shit too many times.” She said it with a sort of defeated sigh as she shoved a menu across the table at me. The lunch rush was over and I was her only table. “And you better tip, too!”

	“It’s okay. Got paid today!” My eyes lit up as I spoke, my voice starting to find traction behind the smile of toothless gaps punctuating each word with sincerity. The waitress wiped her hands on her red smock and propped them up on her waist, impatience oozing from every pore in her sun-cracked skin. “Reuben,” I said, sliding the yellowed menu back toward her across a dusty table, “And a coffee.” She looked straight at me, and the scowl faded just a little. “And juice! Orange juice!” I added. The slightest hint of a smile crept from the corner of her lips before she turned around and disappeared to the kitchen again. The world continued beyond the windows of the diner, this was my first reprieve from the streets in months and I watched the cars and pedestrians go about their day unaware of my existence - though not awkwardly so, for a change. There were so many stories being told, from junkies rocking on stoops to the little piece of police caution tape fluttering in the breeze, I wanted so desperately to reach out and grab one to clutch tight beside my chest, to swallow and regurgitate instead of my own. The waitress returned with my coffee and orange juice in one hand and plated sandwich on marbled rye in the other.

	“You remind me of my dad. Reuben and coffee, every morning.” She breathed an inaudible chuckle as she spoke, remembering the kind of sentimental minutiae people feel when they think about something they lost.

	“You miss him?” I fidgeted with a packet of sugar, real sugar, before tearing it open into my coffee.

	“Heavens no! He was an asshole.” The scowl returned, and with it she moved to the next table. The diner was empty, I didn’t see a reason for the conversation to end.

	“He must regret it. Every papa loves his babies.” I almost shouted, still not used to making loud noises. I shoveled my sandwich into my famished lips and gulped coffee and juice between words.

	“Not mine.” It was all she cared to say.

	“Oh come on,” I was pleading with her now, “how bad could it be?” She returned to my table.

	“The bastard was scum. Things were fine for a while - I think - growing up, but when he lost his job he started drinking. When he started drinking…” she trailed off, lost somewhere in her mind as her fingers subconsciously stroked the evidence of a once-broken nose, the only jagged mark on an otherwise symmetrical, angular face. When her consciousness regained its bearings, she looked at me. “Broke a lot more than my nose, y’know?” I nodded.

	“Know how it feels to hurt yer’ babies too. Knowing you broke the only thing that matters, nothing left to live for. Been longer’n I remember since I seen ‘em. Could never bring myself leave after, even when the street’s my blanket.” I couldn’t fight the welling of tears in my eyes and she took notice. I melted into the cracked red seat of the booth, the only place my painted-on bloodstains were well hidden.

	“Can I ask you a question? And you won’t be offended?” She seemed earnest, and so was I. I nodded my approval. “Why didn’t you leave? My dad did, made it easier for me. Wouldn’t know his face now if I saw it. Could have been nice for your own kiddos knowing the man who hurt ‘em wasn’t around.”

	“Huh.” It wasn’t a question I had expected to ever answer. “Means too much to me I guess.” My plate was clear by now, she brought me a check, and after glancing around for other customers and finding none she sat across from me.

	“Sentimental, huh? Sorry I didn’t mean anything by—”

	“There’s something here.”

	“Your daughter?”

	“No, she… she’s gone. But part of her…” My eyes fell to the dwindling coffee cup on the table, my break from reality was almost over. Soon I would be back to the war in the streets, the struggle for crumbs, the evaporation of my voice.

	“I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

	“Not like that. She got married, babies of her own… a real job.” I downed the rest of my juice in one gulp, hardly stopping to savor the sweet reminder of better times. The coffee was too hot, so I’d have to sip it slowly, but I was ready to leave. “Just a reminder, that’s all.” The waitress reached down the collar of her shirt and produced a small, metal giraffe on a plain black string. Her eyes focused so intently that she seemed to forget all about me, about work, until she shuddered free and held the beast up for my inspection.

	“He gave this to me. I’m ten and we’re at the zoo and I’m crying and want to go home because the giraffes are all sleeping and we can’t see them. They’re my favorite animal. I’m sure he wanted to get home and drink, too.” Tears began to well up in the corner of her eyes but they refused to fall, fighting to stay inside. “He takes me to the gift shop and buys me this, and he hands it to me and says the giraffes are sorry they couldn’t see me today but they couldn’t wait for next time, and if I showed them this necklace they would come and play with me.”

	“Did it work?”

	“Never saw the bastard again. Never got to find out.” And with that the tears dried up, scorched away by returning flames and determination. I asked for a pen, which she handed me after she stuffed the necklace back down her shirt, and then left with my plate to the kitchen. I produced the crisp green bill from my pocket and wrote on it;

‘Go see giraffes
-Nathan’

I folded it small and placed it beneath my plate, then quickly fled the building before she could return. I was back in the storm.

	Meandering to the park gave me enough time to remember the rules of the real world, to avoid eye contact, to not speak, to hide. I broke the rules tonight, I beamed at each face I passed by, grin glistening yellows and browns and gaps my tongue showed through. I noticed that everyone else - they followed the rules too, gazes dawdling at their shoes, walking brisk and silent between the great steel-and-glass towers, the bars that boxed us in, and I realized it then; the city was my crib, my comfort, my home. A crib might feel like a prison, but it’s still protecting you from something.

	As I reached the park I made way for the same bench as before and was relieved to find it empty. I figured I wouldn’t drink that night - not like I could afford it now - so the bench was as good a place as any. I sat beside the same carving in the wood as before. “N.T. 1993 V.T.”, slightly worn around the edges but still legible. My fingers reached out to touch the letters, to trace them just like I once had with a knife, and tears began to cascade from my heavy eyes. I let them fall with the sun that night.

	“I’m sorry, Violet, hope you’re okay baby.”