One pulls change from my hand and it clatters on the counter. The other makes me buy a bottle of water when I am not thirsty and conjures a dirty public bathroom into my future on a sunny day. They push her away from me, back into the world without me, and a red hand turns into a white man walking. I look both ways anyway, cross the street and my phone rings and I do not say hello, I just walk and listen, and he says the other can never be filled, just fed, until you starve it.
His words spin in a circle around my head and explode into every letter of every lost alphabet and he says it is unfair to ever ask anyone else to fill or feed it, and all we have ever done is ask—from birth, from the tit—and he says this is why it has happened again and happened before and will keep happening, and it is our burden alone, and I toss my phone into the black hole of a trash can at the entrance of a park that is green and singing and plumed with barbecue smoke. An ice cream truck jingles and the subway rumbles. Trees are dressed in streamers and balloons. It is a zoo of families that I enjoy visiting to see things I know nothing about.
Steps rise into the stands overlooking a grass field where men are kicking a white ball, booming kicks, trying to beat what pins us to the ground. There is nothing ahead of me but steps and steps and steps, but there is only ever one step, just one step waiting for a foot, for my foot, and I take it two at a time toward the sun. You know what is great about the sun? It does not give a shit about your problems, and I sit alone at the top, needing nothing, not yet, and a balloon floats away.