He looked at me first. I was the one who froze.

Pital, September sixteenth, twenty twenty-four. I'm under a tree I can't name, and the canopy is moving. A white-faced capuchin settles on a thin branch, looks straight at me, holds it. Higher up, a second one shifts through the leaves. The thing I keep coming back to: this isn't really a tree. It's a stacked apartment block. Broad leaves on top, vines threading the middle, bromeliads cupping rainwater like small ponds in the crooks of branches. Each bromeliad is its own little world — frogs, insects, microbes, sometimes fungi feeding on what falls in. The capuchin lives on one floor of this building. I'm just standing in the lobby, looking up.