saturday

i'd spent all day working at the cafe down the street. when i got up the guy sitting next to me said "you beat me." (he had spent the majority of our shared table time adjusting the color saturation on a photograph of a barbed-wire fence, which he ultimately uploaded as his facebook cover photo.) i said "yup" and walked out into the street. i had ambitions for the night. i was going to find a cheap bottle of wine and a watermelon.

as it turns out, bodegas only sell beer and 'california wine product', so i had to find a liquor store. henry's sounded like a good name when it came up on google search, but when i got there it was a high-end wine shop -- the kind with little rope-and-paper handwritten price tags hanging on the necks of each bottle, ideal for a future life in which i have a source of income. i ended up leaving with a bottle of romanian (yes romanian) pinot - at $9 it was the cheapest bottle in the store. there were no watermelons at any of the grocery shops i passed on the way home.

we took the fire escape to get up to the roof. in the backyard of the building there was a bonfire barbeque going on, which seemed very adult in comparison to our bottle of undated wine and apple sauce cups. from so high up i couldn't tell if they were 20-somethings or 40-somethings. either way we waved and they waved back.

sitting on top of the roof with our backs against the curved rim we couldn't see much of a sunset. it was a gentle one and the sky never went completely dark. we don't have a view of the skyline, we have a view of queens. the tip of a church, a square of green, other people's windows. but there were fireworks, twice in an hour. i figure from high up enough in the world you could see fireworks every night. i scooped into a packet of apple sauce and leaned my head back. no stars. wait - two stars. no, one's an airplane. they're both airplanes. finally it got cold and we scuttled down the ladder and make a frozen pizza in the microwave. it's meant to be oven-baked for 25 minutes but the knob on the oven is broken off so we stuck it in the microwave for 3 minutes and it came out perfect. a handy trick. we discussed the comparative dangers of coffee and cocaine and coach salaries and television sexism. we listened to jake bugg.

i get my fix of stars later, while i'm laying in bed, squinting through my newsfeed with my contacts out. a video comes up: a 3d rendering of a hubble photograph. there are billions of galaxies. the narrator says the human mind can't grasp what that means. falling asleep i think about how there are billions of humans, too. we can't completely fathom what that means, either, but living in the city helps.