Born To Fly
We enter this world with a cry and a breath,
Every step that we take is a dance closer to death,
We cling to what’s fleeting, what time will refuse,
We cherish, we love, but we’re born to lose.
He had entered the party with raw confidence. It was one of those evening roof gatherings with orange light where young people meet to socialise and try not to look at their cell phones for more than five minutes. He thought, “I am going to meet someone interesting today.” Everyone smelled good and looked as if the world had no problems. As he walked through the fancy people, he started to believe that he had no problems either.
The owner of the apartment worked in high tech, which meant he earned a living setting up a strategy for a redundant product. A redundant product whose strategy he had learned from a machine, which had itself designed and implemented the product and would probably improve it before anyone finished implementing the latest version.
He looked for the hors d’oeuvres and whatever alcohol was fuelling the socialization. He buttoned his two-piece suit. The conversations around were about automation, artificial intelligence, and other subjects that could make it to the syllabus at any insomnia clinic in the world. He felt old, not because he was older than the people at the party but because he could still remember a time when people went to parties to have conversations about subjects they did not hear about on YouTube or TikTok.
In the middle of the crowd, he saw his friend Gianni, the Italian programmer who always smelled of garlic and good intentions, a combination so potent it arrived in a room approximately four seconds before he did, which Gianni considered a social advantage.
“Gianni, why is your jacket moving?”
“Is not the jacket, is shrimp, we discuss later.”
He kept moving through the party, found an unknown guest and asked about the Basquiat on the wall. The guest replied that he didn’t like football players.
A woman passed by him. She was blonde. Short hair. He handed her a drink. She took it.
“These parties,” he said.
“Yes,” she answered.
Silence.
“The LED wall,” he said.
“I know.”
“Someone explained blockchain to me using a bowling metaphor.”
“Did it work?”
“I understood bowling less afterward.”
She nodded slowly. “I play cello.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t know why I said that.”
“No, it’s good.”
More silence.
“Do you airwalk?” he asked.
“Sorry?”
“Airwalk. Like the shoes. Or the thing. Where you walk but—” he demonstrated nothing.
She stared at him. “I play cello,” she said again.
“Right.”
“With my actual hands.”
“Sure.”
A man nearby said the word disruptive four times in one sentence. They both looked at him.
“I lost a bet,” she said. “Me too.”
“What was yours?”
“I said this party would be fine.”
She almost laughed. Almost. Then she handed back the drink.
“I should go find my cello,” she said.
“It’s here?”
“No.”
She left.
He watched her go and thought that she was probably the most interesting person he would not get to know that year. And like that, he was back at street level, another number in the algorithm. He kept walking and saw the stairs to the roof. He climbed as fast as he could.
Upstairs, the tower roof, and the city around. The phallic idea of power of the tech guy who owned the apartment. He approached the ledge. He was not afraid of highs; he was fascinated by the abyss. Somehow, the empty air around the tower had more substance than the conversations inside it. All he wanted was to look at his phone. To have a private social defeat.
He stepped off the ledge and walked on air the way you walk on a Monday morning, reluctantly but forward.
The city spread below like a circuit board that had given up on itself. The sky was the color of a bruised tangerine, streaked with pink that nobody had approved. Buildings blinked. A helicopter passed, embarrassed.
A crow landed on his shoulder.
“You shouldn’t be up here,” the crow said.
“Nobody should be anywhere,” he answered.
The crow considered this. “Fair. Which beach this summer?”
“Comporta, maybe. You?”
“Wherever there is unattended shrimp.”
The crow left without saying goodbye, which he respected.
He descended slowly, past lit windows where people were doing spreadsheets, ordering sushi and explaining their feelings poorly. The air smelled of August and bad decisions.
He landed on the street.
Gianni was there, jacket still lumpy, smelling of garlic and deep purpose.
“Which app?” Gianni asked, pointing upward with one shrimp.
“Imagination.”
Gianni nodded seriously, opened his phone, searched for it, found nothing, put the phone away.
“Is not on the App Store,” Gianni said.
“No,” he agreed.
They stood there a moment.
“The shrimp is getting warm,” Gianni said.
“Everything is,” he said.
