New York City is special. You can spend a lifetime traveling and never leave the city limits. You can spend a weekend biking through it and pass through a million different cities. You can be a million miles away and find the green globe of a subway stop lighting up a lonely, quiet corner. You can be in humid midsummer on top of the hill at Sunset Park, seeing Manhattan, the sunset, from miles away.

You can also take repose on a rooftop, maybe when you need it the most. You can watch the people in the building across the street living out their lives, almost close enough to touch, a grid of windows. You can see a world of rooftop terraces, the occasional penthouse, and grey and brown wooden watertowers. They're too numerous to count and from rooftops everything seems close - you want, of course, to be able to jump from one to the next. To fly through, exploring this strange aerial world, all tabletops, craggy summits, smokestacks, and the inevitable crevices between them. You want to be a the most limber tightrope walker, to with two quick paces alight on the next roof, circle the watertower running your palm against its rough surface, feeling the cold iron of the protruding nailheads with your finger before throwing a new line across a gap; in between steps in this brief span you look down to the checkered game of automobiles, to the dancing and woven paths of pedestrians, you hear for a moment a honk, but you take your next step and are on a new roof, a new garden, seeing new buildings - grey, brown, orange, black, or cold impersonal glass - new hard topography.

I cannot throw a line or jump. Not from the window of the kitchen in the office, or from any of the conference rooms either. I can't jump to terraces with sculpted concrete - gargoyles, urns, petric ivy. I have no line. The belief that I can passes, the desire remains.

Last night, for a moment on a rooftop in Chelsea looking north and East, quiet when I needed to be, and thankful that I refused the offered beer. I so rarely take quiet time when there are others around, but I did, and was thankful that my company, my friend among these strangers, knew where I was.