The Mathematician

His boxes of books, dusty and quiet, collected cobwebs in a storage unit in Texas.

Exit 227, a life in a metal box.

He was living quite differently now, in a place where people were stacked many stories tall and elevators creaked under the weight of something he couldn’t see. Out the window he glimpsed the tops of skyscrapers and hotels; without context, sometimes he’d see them against the faded pastels of sunset and imagine they were infinitely tall, as though he lived in a city among the clouds.

2014