The Grid of Quiet

Concrete exhales the heat of a hurried day, a slow radiation under the orange hum of lamps that have forgotten how to blink. The street is a river of cooling tar.

Windows are square-cut gems of amber and blue, suspended in the brick-work's heavy dark. Behind one glass, a curtain drifts like a lung, counting the seconds of a stranger's sleep.

No footsteps break the geometry of the curb, only the click-clack of a cooling engine settling into the silence of the gutter. The sky is a bruise that never quite fades.

We are held in the architecture of waiting, braced by steel beams and the memory of motion, until the sun resets the clocks and the grey world learns to breathe again.