You’re at a newsstand in Rome, laughing beside the rain-ruined copies of Il Giornale.
Your best friend is teaching you the right way to blow bubblegum.
Beneath the same green awning, a man shows his girlfriend how to properly smoke cigarettes.
These are lessons in exhaling.
We practice what it feels like to let go. It’s better to start here, start small.

The world has revolved around this street corner for years. Through empires and world wars and quiet nights where you could hear the oxygen in the air grow older and turn into carbon dioxide. What once kept us alive now poisons us. No one notices, and this is the source of all scenes that look something like bliss.

There are Americans on the corner who believe in God, and then there are those who would rather pray on hands and knees to any man on a soapbox confessional who says he is one. This is a study in the misguided. These are sins of idolatry committed in daylight. This is the death rattle of the party, the song skipping on a broken record as the lights come on. These are the nights we try to decide if ignorance is truly bliss. So let’s sit still in this Italian intersection and argue about this: The only reason we know how beautiful Eden was is because we felt it fall.