• Below Alexis lay a vast constellation of city lights, scattered across the otherwise dark earth. They shifted, flickered, and twinkled through the screen of unshed tears that were imprisoned in her eyes. She blinked rapidly against the burn, but no matter how many times she did, it remained.
    Beneath the soles of her feet, which dangled over the edge of the roof almost nonchalantly, the heights were dizzying. She couldn’t see just how high up she was now, with the tears that so blinded her, but she could sense how far away the ground was. She knew that scooting even a couple inches forward would send her tumbling into nothingness, and it was a strangely intoxicating idea. Death, she thought, was an anesthesiologist, an unseen doctor with the ability to end forever the excruciating sorrow she felt.
    But she wasn’t suicidal. She was placeless, she was alone, and she felt a pain greater than anything else she had ever known, but she couldn’t bring herself to seek death’s endless supply of morphine. Maybe this was courage or maybe this was cowardice - she couldn’t say for sure. Either way, even if the idea crossed her mind, she wouldn’t end her life - or so she believed.
    Her eyes slipped shut, and as they closed, one solitary tear broke out of its prison, slipping past the delicate black bars that were her eyelashes, and running down her cheek. She remembered.
    She remembered an old, pock-marked woman sitting on the chair right across from her, a cigarette in hand. Hazy streamers of smoke rose from the end of the cigarette, drifting lazily through the air in the bar around them with a meandering deliberation. She remembered the dull glint in the woman’s eyes, like jewels covered by a thin blanket of dust.
    The woman had smiled bitterly and taken the cigarette between her cracked lips, breathing in deeply. As she exhaled, sheets of smoke riding on her breath, she had asked, “Hey, wanna hear a joke?”
    Alexis had shifted uncomfortably as she came back from the reverie that had claimed her. “Sure,” she said in a reluctant tone.
    “Life.” The woman smiled again. Her eyes glimmered dully with poisoned mirth and smoked poured through the cracks in her teeth, making her look like a grinning dragon.
    Alexis had tried to smile, tried to force her lips to bend upward, but when she succeeded, it felt like nothing more than muscles in her face moving. There had been no real joy, no light that wasn’t laced with filthy dust.
    She had felt only sorrow then, and she felt only sorrow now, staring down at the city far beneath her. She didn’t want to believe that life was a joke. She wanted desperately to believe that there was a reason she was alive, whether or not the woman at the bar - the woman she called her mother - agreed.
    She brushed the solitary tear off her cheek with one of her knuckles and looked at it. In the dim city light, she could barely see the drop of water. She probably would have been able to see it better in the starlight alone, but here, she could still make out the barest shape of it, a minuscule curve.
    For a moment, she imagined it was a crystal ball that gave her, in pictures, all the answers she sought. It was a foolish fancy - those dreams didn’t matter, wouldn’t change anything about how she felt now. With a sad smile, she wiped the teardrop away.