Rows of rounded cone-shaped lights reflect across the canyon, float like jellyfish suspended in the space between buildings. Everywhere I look, they are white and luminous, filling each window, tiny ufos, white chocolate kisses, ghostly glass hearts. These reflections can seem more attractive than the reality of them, the simple smokey fixtures, the imperfections sanded and flecked in the surface.

There's an old hippie outside with three backpacks. Two he carries, the weight of their contents pull his arms straight. One he hitches onto his back and shifts his balance, his freshly lit cigarette ashing upon the sidewalk, spreading fire before the cleverly-named boutiques. I wonder what each of them contains, my mind racing across every possibility, from the absurd to the probable. And this infinite potential of the untold story can seem more attractive than the revelation of their actual contents.

I'm writing in a coffee house with imtboo, who is real and breathing and wearing a red sweater, the tiny white moose on her chest seeming to continually pull my attention towards it. Around me, the baristas stack chairs and sweep away the dust and the flakes of skin, the scuff marks from a hundred feet, the remnants of the passing of moments. Bruce Springstein alternately blares and coos over the speakers. There's no ignoring him.

And these things are beautiful. The spaces between change are full of promise and death, sudden and intense surprises, or simply the long sustained hum of the resonance of living. The minutia of mundanity holds as much mystique as the most outlandishly dreamed-of adventure or the biggest Hollywood blockbuster epic. It just requires a shift of focus, an appreciation for the shortness of states of being, the understanding that a new second comes as the old second slips forever away.