I was sitting in a Minneapolis skyway overlooking downtown as below me the yearly St. Patrick’s Day parade carried on in all its garish glory. I could see the elation on the faces of the shit-faced thirty-year-olds wearing hockey sweatshirts and waving cans of beer in the air. I could trace the rims of the trombones in the marching band with my cold nose pressed on the glass, but I couldn’t hear a sound. I was a sophomore in high school watching a silent movie I desperately wanted to have a part in. I recalled sitting at parties, sober and bored in the corner, while everyone else removed shirts in a game of strip poker. I thought of atoms endlessly colliding in motion, without direction or cause.

I was sitting on the ground with a boy I had known for years and the space between our thighs and hands was imperceptibly buzzing with our mutual anxiety of the lack of things to say. I looked down the hall of the skyway, at the random couplings of people crouched on the mauve carpet, watching the craziness of the city beneath them: a striking woman in a mink coat holding the hand of her unassuming husband with thinning hair; a little girl with an Afro standing captivated by the window picking her nose and her father, watching her with adoration while an unlit cigarette hung limp from his mouth; two young women with Teletubbies backpacks and one with thick black-rimmed glasses, not even watching the parade, but each other.

We all sat in a shared silence, like some benevolent gods bemused by the cheeky little people on Earth. How strange the blinking emerald lights of leprechauns seemed from afar. I let go of trying to frantically form small talk, to break the peace I assumed was awkward. I let go of wishing I were a part of the party. I let go and basked in the warmth of the enclosed space, the beauty of observing life from the sky.