Characters of the Concrete

Sometimes the city looks back at me. An older man in a cap, sitting on a chair in the middle of the sidewalk, opens his mouth to the sun as if the whole street were his living room; behind him, a woman in red holds her cigarette up high like someone holding on to her own patience. A shirtless boy comes down the street on a skateboard between the cars, his long necklace swinging, as if the asphalt were his by right. A man in a white shirt sits on a low wall with a cup in his hand, turned side-on to the street, waiting for something it has not brought him yet. And at the lake, an older man in a flowered shirt smokes the way someone smokes who has always smoked right there, his white hair lifted by the wind, while a boy runs past with a popsicle, everything still ahead of him and not the faintest idea of it.

The sun hits their faces without asking, and they let it. I don't know what pulls me at those hours. I only know that I stop. And that the afternoon, afterwards, is left with their faces.