God will come and wash away our tattoos and all the cocaine

Woke up in Pittsburgh early this morning after twelve hours of sleep. Breathed in air. Attic windows illuminate brick houses, metal roofing washed iridescent with rust and rain. Houses crowded so elegantly, distant pines spread across the distant mountains walling us into Sharpesburg. Tea outside for breakfast, the Zenith for lunch. My cousin Brian suggesting the city is "paradise, under deconstruction," noting how the poorest parts of the town lack a single grocery store, yet never are wanting for the spires of Catholic churches. And men who bartend and hunt deer will refuse neat scotch to dirty niggers, and angsty chickenwire art spins slowly, suspended from the ceilings of antique shops. All the architecture has always already been defaced by graffiti here, dust ignited neon under bridges, and everywhere an unfaded revelry of names humming in cacophonous blue and red beneath the traffic, indicating a population forged entirely in neglect like steel. I alternate between reading Machiavelli's "The Prince" and de Saint-Exupery's "The Little Prince." I befriend a girl with a pink mohawk and a jump rope. I run my fingers along our halls of stained glass and peeled wallpaper, stucco Greek doorways, dried flowers pinned everywhere. In the evening we sit outside on concrete stairs, overdressed for the poor part of town. And I start drinking blueberry Stolichnaya and I grow aware that the heart may yet awaken from its sleeping.