mouths w/ nothing to say & eyes w/ nothing to look @

            The metal railing feels cold on my elbow, even though we are in the stuffy epicenter of summer.  I’m leaning back, both elbows up, wondering of I’m coming off as being too self-conscious of how I look, distanced as I am from just about everyone else while trying to give off the impression that I’m just indifferently relaxing in this low-trafficked corner of the roof.  I don’t care how I’m coming off, if I’m even coming off as anything at all.  But, I feel that if I saw me w/ my own eyes, I’d see an anti-social party-pooper flashing false grins and staring blankly out over the city.

            Although, my wooden stolidity has its own splinters of lies wedged in it.  I do care, but only up to the point where I know I’m neither anti-social nor a party-pooper.  I find it irksome—though, yet, not enough to rally against it—that I’ll be perceived as quite possibly the opposite of what I am.  Why am I grinning?  I’m content in the moment I’m in.  Why am I staring out over the city?  It intrigues.  It hums.  It hypnotizes.

            I should probably mingle more than I have been.  Earlier, I’d put minimal effort into a few conversations which I’d either excused myself from or just totally went blank in the middle of.  I didn’t even offer any obligatory uh-huhs or nods.  I just stared at mouths as words came out, most of them dropping names or  trying to convince me of the amazingness the here-&-now speaker embodied.  While someone I didn’t know and, by the mixture of the Laws of Probability and the good luck juju of crossed fingers, would never see again prattled incessantly & nauseatingly on, I’d scan the entire rooftop gathering for someone else I’d have the dubious fortune of feigning interest in.

            So, I took my drink—a scotch rocks which I still haven’t even touched and is now just an air-temperature watered-down scotch which is surprisingly creating a mist of condensation on its tumbler—to a corner of the roof where I’m currently standing, looking out over the parallels and perpendiculars of the city streets.  I have a vague knowledge of where I’m located, trying to figure out which thoroughfare down below is the ambiguous territorial line between Chelsea and Tribeca.

The deejay has been hitting my mood perfectly with his song choices.

            And I can’t seem to put a finger on what my mood actually is.  It’s not for lack of trying.  When I think I know if I’m cheerful or melancholy or bored, it gets out from under me and gets replaced by something else that doesn’t transition smoothly at all.  I feel like I’m being jostled.  My moods have hopped into bumper cars and aren’t listening to the underpaid ambivalent acne-infested teenager yelling to enjoy their ride safely.

            I can feel my cheeks wrinkle upward into the most infinitesimal of smiles.  I’m aware of my calm, regulated breathing pattern.  But I can sense a quickened pulse.  It’s not flowing thru me, not yet, but I feel it building up.  It is tightening its bootstraps, rolling up its sleeves, tucking in its shirt because it knows it is going to be called upon to act.  Soon.

            Large white outdoor Christmas-type lights are strung above the party, wound around pipes and poles and railings and antennas.  Some are burnt out.  Some reflect off the ever-shimmering surface of the water in the kiddie pool, in which is kept the soiree’s store of ice, beer, and soda.  Some give the party-goers luminescent domes, like haloes pressed down into their hair.

            There is a scuffle somewhere.  Up here.  On the roof.  My eyes dart around the goers, making everyone a phosphorescent blur, losing their defining line where skin & clothes end and the rest of existence begins.  They all look like giant glowing commas.  I can’t place the argument.  I hear shattering.  No heavy clunks, just the gentle chime of glass coming apart at newly-created seams.

            The deejay miscalculates a musical segue and I can see everyone subconsciously pick up on it.  A shift from one foot to the other.  A roll of tense shoulders.  A quick squinted glance upward into the starless night sky.

            I look across the street to what I have decided is an apartment building.  I am eye-level with one of the floors and, for the past 20 minutes or so, I’ve been keeping a sporadic eye on one window in particular.  Thru this window I can see the length of an apartment.  And pacing the length of this apartment is a man on a phone.  He walks up to the window, turns, walks to the far wall, turns, then returns to the window.  The almost half an hour I’ve been keeping track of him making this loop, his arm has been curled to the side of his head.  It reminds me of a mug handle.

            The gait of his pacing is not what I would call spry or bouncy.  He is, in fact, lumbering up and down the length or width of his apartment with a tilt to whichever side his foot falls to.  I can’t even imagine what he could be talking about for this long while pacing the same invisible path, without switching phone hands.  He’s a big guy, too.  An over-exerciser, I decide.  I my mind, I have him hurling the phone out of view, smashing the window with the double-team of his fists, leaping to the sill while pounding his chest and roaring.

            In reality, he only turns again at the window and heads back to the far wall of his pad.  In reality, I’m talking absolute nonsense to someone I don’t know…and enjoying it.  In reality, I’m the center of attention and greedy for it.  In reality, winter has fallen and I’m up here alone on the roof, shin-deep in snow.