You ever feel tired?
Not the regular stayed-up-umpteen-hours-doing-stuff-and-now-your-body-needs-to-catch-some-Zzz kind.

The kind where you're always "getting through", or "getting over", yet never feeling like you're really getting to that other side.

No matter that you can see it.

That light at the end of the tunnel turns out just to be light let in from a gap, in the middle of a longer tunnel.

Master EffeX turned his head. His neck having every right to be stiff given where he chose to lie down last night, but he'd gotten used to sleeping in "not very comfortable" spots.

His eyes fell on a garbage can some distance away, and in his mind's eye he saw himself there with his Dad. Except the garbage can was a BBQ, and the park was some sprawling yard. He, as a kid, was standing by, observing his Dad's technique on the grill. It was nothing much beyond basic, but it was something his Dad was doing. So, he watched.

The image shifted to his Dad picking through that garbage can, himself watching him shift deftly through the true trash to find some morsel to share.

Master EffeX narrowed his eyes. No.
That image was wrong.

He'd had a home. Hadn't he? And he'd never been on the streets with his Dad.

So how come now he was. .

. .Alone.

At least in the sense of having family; found or otherwise.

In the literal sense, he wasn't.
He was, after all, in densely populated New York City.