What the Window Does

The HealthLine runs Euclid Ave after eleven and the car is almost empty. There's an electric quiet to it — not the underground-tunnel kind, more like the hum of something that doesn't need to announce itself. Outside: glass towers with a few floors still lit, a pharmacy sign glowing behind closed doors, the wide-lane geometry of an avenue rebuilt for a city that didn't quite materialize. Cleveland at night has a specific texture, dry and alert, like you're passing through rooms in a house where the furniture used to be arranged differently.

The song is a ride from downtown east through Cedar-Fairmount and back, told by someone who stays on past their stop, watching. At East 105th a hooded figure steps off onto an amber platform and is gone before you can register a face. Terminal Tower holds its position in the far distance. The chorus doesn't grieve — it just counts: the city held twice as many people once, when the mills were running. The narrator is not here to eulogize anything. Just watching the window do what windows do.

[Verse 1] Euclid Ave at eleven PM the HealthLine hums on its wire past the Cleveland Trust rotunda dark past the pharmacy with its one light on inside a man with his hood up at East 105th steps off before I see his face the platform empty in the amber, then gone— the door sighs shut, we accelerate

[Chorus] This city held twice as many back when the mills were still white-hot I'm not mourning anything, just counting what the window shows and what it's not

[Verse 2] Terminal Tower in the far distance a spike above the residue of dark the LED flicker on the ceiling makes the car feel like a fish tank after dark nobody boards at Cedar-Fairmount the conductor's voice says nothing at all just the electric quiet underneath us and the avenue going wall to wall

[Bridge] I read the ads for urgent care for check-cashing, for God somebody taped a handwritten number under the bench I can't make out

[Verse 3] East end of the line, the turn-back loops I stay put past the point I should the driver watches me in the mirror I think I'm fine, I think it's understood the closed storefronts, the wide-lane geometry the city built for twice what showed I ride it back to Public Square in silence watching the window do what windows do

[Outro] the window do what windows do the window do what windows do