The question I am left with is the question of her loneliness.
And I prefer to put it off.
It is morning.

Anne Carson, The Glass Essay

A rooftop in Oxford; a flat in London; a valley in Nevada

It is morning. I am ending. I stand above the city and I watch the world take form. I recall a dream from a childhood that is no longer mine. A clamor arises among the city bells, and each peal is agony: an invocation, a condemnation. Slick and damp, the rafters are numb to my lapsarian resolve, my pale impression of the morning star. Frost gives way to swollen drops of dew. First light creeps in along the eaves. Shadows lengthen across the bruised earth below.

I have been given everything. I have retained nothing. I gaze down at a world I cannot fathom, where lonely spires strike like brands against my sight. I taste exhilaration and defeat, surrender and some uncertain promise. It occurs to me that this might prove the most compelling moment of my tired existence: shivering beneath an iron sky, alone but for deleterious rooks in the far-flung belfries, the soles of my bare feet aching with cold and tensed against the unfeeling edge.