∞

"What's next?"

It was cold. Not too cold, though. For once, it actually felt like autumn, a season we only get a brief glimpse of where we live.

There was nobody around. It made sense — after all, it was well past midnight on a Monday night.

But there we stood, four people on the rooftop of an 8-story building. It was just us and the loud whistle of the night wind that threatened to sweep us off our precarious balance on the top of the city. The city, if one could call it that. But even dilapidated cities look like real cities at midnight, when all we could see were the small dots on streetlights and skyscrapers that surrounded us in the distance. We could pretend we were somewhere bigger.

We could pretend we were something bigger.

But maybe we were bigger that night. Maybe there was something that felt bigger, as we took a bottle, a pack of Blacks and an anthology of Updike short stories and impulsively climbed the rungs of a tall ladder to the top of the world.

Maybe it was the fact that we didn't know the answer to "what's next?" that made us feel bigger, as if we, four people searching for everything and nothing at the same time, wielded the power of the unknown. As if we held, just for a brief moment on that windy night, the driving force of the world in our palms.

As if we suddenly realized what it meant to seem big and small at the same time. Powerful, yet insignificant. Omnipotent, but clueless. We felt infinite, but at the same time, terrifyingly mortal. A terror that we embraced, that we turned into a still calm,

all wrapped up in a solitary, simple question.

"What's next?"

"The world."