Pop Quiz No. 1

Someone just told me, "You should take consolation in the idea that there's a higher power." I hope I don't offend anyone by admitting here that I've never believed, though for a time I tried. And that if I did, belief would be the opposite of consolation.

Tonight, I have a certain strain of piano music playing in my head, and before I navigated the stairs in the dark, consolation was the idea of sitting on the stoop to have a smoke, a dark blue sky, a warm breeze, stars and moon and these rambling hills around me, and the stucco buildings scattered like pieces of broken shell.

Instead I found consolation under a gray night sky, the slick-wet street, and the same piano I mentioned above made less melancholy (for some reason) because across from the stoop is an empty building, its interior walls now rubble in the back of a truck. More precisely, it was in the particulates of rain haloed in the street lamp, just heavy enough to fall.

Q.

Tell me about something so beautiful, it hurts.