Pg 31...

A man in a top floor apartment was wearing a white string vest. He was sweating, reading, smoking. The world below him held no purpose to his tired eyes which dragged themselves reluctantly across the tissue paper pages of the newspaper. He had lived too long to be surprised by anything, his forlorn wife entering the balcony with a glass of orange juice and some bread. He cast aside the offering with a small noise and a throw of his gritty sandpaper hand which let itself return to the left side of the man's broadsheet, rippling strongly under the wind. He looked up from the paper and stared down towards the road. Now busy with movement. Nobody saw him and nobody cared, his life drifting past himself on a slipstream of shuffled feet, hurried suits and noisy traffic. His eyelids slowly closing in a millisecond. In that time all his life and thoughts returned to a rendezvous inside of him. Tiny dots of colour assembling themselves and exploding before his blackened vision. A single droplet was forming in his tear duct, quaking and quivering. Bringing his head over the railings he let it roll away from his face, his body tensing and filled with emotion. He pulled himself backwards towards the gaping doors and flapping curtains of his home. His tear was falling down at great speed towards the road and as it made contact, at that very moment, clouds parted and the heavens fell upon the earth. Raindrops crashing over Parisian minds. The wasted lives of the city's inhabitants, crashing to earth, to join the teardrop of the man. As those who still lived their lives sheltered under shops and inside corners of cafés.