The Weather of Drift

At dawn the rooftops lift their backs like whales, antennas tasting for a signal that never lands. The air is a thin soup of traffic and lilac, and somewhere above, a satellite forgets our names.

I imagine its panels as wings made of quiet, catching a cold sun the way a kettle catches steam. Below, laundromat windows glow like small moons, each spinning an ordinary galaxy of shirts.

There is a weather to drift, a kind of mild gravity that pulls us toward familiar doors and neon hum. We call it routine, but it is a tide of needles, a stitching that keeps the city from unravelling.

Tonight the sky is a paper map with no legend. I walk it anyway, folding corners with my breath. Somewhere a radio scans, a heartbeat looking for its twin, and I answer by being here, by being human and near.