I didn't plan for things to turn out this way. I only desired to satiate the restlessness inside me, the ants and bees that crawl through my guts searching for a task to grant their short lives meaning. Through soaring stonework and winding stairs, I wanted to reach into the sky, the place I believe my lungs are, breathing air so thin that they're always gasping and my head is always light and vertigo-prone. From the moment I struggled for my first breath and broke into wracking infant sobs up until today, I've been like a fresh-caught fish with red gills opening and closing in desperate, coded pleas for water. I thought this could fix me or maybe resolve something inside of me, I didn't mean to cause such a mess.

Was it so wrong to want a castle on the ocean, something that glinted like seafoam and the smooth-curved insides of shells? Was it wrong to want to see how far I could take the spiral of a snail? Even now, sentenced to ruinous half-birth, the stone of this place feels so cool against my flattened palms and dusty feet that for a moment I can be still. And at the top, innards exposed and webbed with abandoned workers' ladders, platforms, and pulleys, I can even touch a cloud.

Touch a cloud! Can you believe that a cloud feels like nothing? A cold, wet nothing that I'd drink if I could, and if I could I'd be cured, once and for all, I'm sure of it. Whether the tower is finished or not, whether the people blame me or understand the tragedy of my position, it does not matter. I will lie in this window like a napping cat and collect the clouds in clay jars until I can drink them, and maybe, after a few years of this, I'll be all better, and something important will have been made clear to me, something to make all of this worthwhile.