i watch it as it loses form.

In first grade, he taught me how to stack the building blocks higher than I had been able to myself, sacrificing stability towards the top for ever-higher summits. The girls built sturdy, low-lying compounds, always with single entranceways. They seemed pedestrian. We erected undulating monoliths, avant garde towers that tried to emulate the impossibly giant buildings our fathers went to work in in midtown and down at the Battery, but that more closely predicted the Frank Gehry makeover that would come to the city years later. We'd build them as high as we could, and when Ms. Mellow told us playtime was over - we had to take them down - Roman would start deliberately deconstructing the blocks, while waiting for just the right time to give the bottom of a tower a subtle nudge with his velcro sneaker, sending the whole thing tumbling down in a terrifically loud crash.
The entire class would freeze.
'Roman!' Ms. Mellow would yell.
Shrugging, palms upturned, an expression that would have been purest innocence were it not for a deficit of blush in the cheeks: 'What?'
She could never prove a thing.