The reflections in New York are yellow. They’ve got their shiny blue glass, and walls of windows reaching up for miles into the sky. Reaching so far up you’ve got to crane your neck ‘til you think of Jack and the beanstalk and the giant who comes down on top of you like the damned humidity.

And in the walls you’ve got cabs. Cabs and school buses, swarming horizontally like a moving wallpaper of locusts. And the traffic lights too, hung outwards, yellow snail-eyes on grey stalks, pricking the glass with dots of red, amber and green.

It’s a city of primary colours, but best viewed in monochrome 1280x1024.

At night, 86 floors up, or standing on a jetty, it’s black, an adult toy-town. You would’ve put the blocks in place, then carefully and intricately detailified them. Et voila, your very own energy-guzzling Black Sea, punctuated by quivering yellow lights in the distance, like watering eyes. And you’re thinking about 9/11 while you’re up there. You’re imagining yourself falling all those floors. Falling from so high up that the people really are ants, and it’s all beyond what you can fathom so you just see it as a view rather than a city.

It’s not real.

But the wind pummels you ‘til it hurts so much it’s got to be real. And then you need to pee, which is bloody real.

Three hours and 86 floors down on 5th Avenue. The reflections here are yellow. A row of yellow lights spilling over a sea of yellow vehicles behind a yellow girl. The lines between the windows cut me up. The glass is imperfect. All I see is a yellow blur.