Everything was blue. My arms were raised towards the sky like I had done as a child with sore legs waiting for my father to pick me up. A friend, whom I’ll refer to as Z, stood next to me on the top floor of a chalky parking garage. The sky should have been some shade of boysenberry pink but was simply blue instead, open and boundless.

Z chain smoked American Spirits, occasionally extinguishing them on the rubber sole of his shoe when campus security came around. His skin was picked at and scarred from adolescent acne and his eyebrows were overgrown and always furrowed, creating a shadow that casted over the bridge of his nose. He raised them when I jumped to sit on the cement ledge and then stood by my side as I tapped the heel of my boots against the garage’s wall.

I watched Z lean over the ledge with folded arms and peer down at the people who kissed their lovers goodbye in the car. He took another smoke to his mouth and released an averse exhale when he stepped back from the edge; a child that had decided not to squash ants beneath the foot of his sneaker.

I knew little about Z, except that he was from an affluent family up the east coast that dabbled in heroin. He was contentious and saw the world through a straw, thick-headed and somehow homesick. He was confiding in a stranger and looking beyond me when I coaxed him with my best advice.

“What will you do if you go back home and argue with your parents? Where will you run to then?”

“Well, I’d go to my second house then,” he said, followed by a smirk and then a sigh. It was that simple.

We sat in six minutes of silence while I kicked the back of my dangling heels against the cement. Left, right, left, right, the occasional sound of a crow above or a car door shutting below. I could think of nothing to say because we shared the same heavy, homesick heart. Instead, I had brought him to the roof of a parking garage to find some sort of enlightenment, liberation, or even companionship.

I sat with my neck craned upward to listen to the talking crows and to feel small beneath the 6 p.m. sky. I shifted so that there was an ugly hunch in my back and so that I could see Z standing behind me, cigarette in hand, out of the corner of my eye. He was staring at the tar-speckled cement floor and, my god, how badly I wanted to lift his chin with both of my hands so that he would just look at the god damn sky.

Z’s cigarette burned cherry red before he ashed it for the final time, I asked him if he was ready to go before the sky could transition from baby blue to stripes of carnation pink. When I asked what he thought he said, “That was nice,” and continued to create a visual pathway on the floor that led to the exiting stairwell. Z slapped the garage's chalky remnants off of his corduroys in annoyance, while I fingered the dry grit between my index and thumb in silence.

I couldn’t give him comfort or liberation, it was not my obligation, yet I felt unfulfilled and burdened by empathetic sadness when I left to go back to my dorm and saw him spark another smoke. I could not force him to take his eyes off of the floor and see the transience of the sky, and I could not convince him to, somehow, silence the homesickness that made his shoulders hunch.

I turned around in hope of seeing Z outside, looking up with a child-like gaze and finding a moment of equanimity, at last. Instead, he was rubbing the toe of his sneaker against the street pavement to extinguish the butt of his American Spirit, and brushing off the remaining white chalk from his torso. By now, the sky was slate blue and, had I not known better, Z's silhouette could have been mistaken for a boy capering, or maybe squashing ants beneath the foot of his shoe.