There’s something exhilarating about taking a shower and stepping out into the city, a light breeze whipping through your damp hair. You’re coming down from a weightlifting session—a disappointing one—but the subsequent shower has lifted your spirits. You’re breathing a bit more clearly, your skin awash in sensation, frisson aplomb on your mind and across the expanse of your arms. You inhale deeply, reflecting on the journey ahead: a walk through busy streets, down stairs, and along the way, the city alive and thrumming all around you. You can feel a hint of exhaustion in your bones, a heavy sigh as ebullient sounds reverberate through your ears—a clash of mind and body, spirit and ability.

You shamble onto the train.

You feel the absence of that comforting breeze, the uplift of that walk now a fading memory. All around you, the bustle of intersecting yet parallel lives collides, paths crossed but obscured in ultimately private worlds. Each mind contained within a universe, swimming through the ether or lost in the skipping of a distant beat: a heartbeat, a drum, a passing song. Your thoughts circle the drain, drawn downward through an infinite cascade of reality, possibility, and a cursed fixation on what’s lacking; on inner fire, on creativity, on what it means to exist, to practice, to have meaning, purpose.

These doubts confound you. You were just floating through streets, enchanted by the breath of life brushing across your face; a renewal of freedom, unburdened by your own self-effacement. Just existing in that moment, creaking, crafting a prism within your heart, one fractured by the very light that gives it brilliance.

You sit down on a different train. You’re traveling home, drifting with deference, tilting, rioting within yourself against a prison you’ve built. You have been this person far longer than any other. This is who you are: damaged goods, a well-seasoned forgery, the fool in a queen’s gambit, hunting for resonance in a space that is all but inescapable. There is no sound, no light, only the persistent reminder that you’ve been here before.

No—you’ve never left.

You miss that breeze.