[ Week 17, Day 6 -> 7 | Dream ] daylight slants like a razor
[ooc: COMMENT SPAM WELCOME. No need to write a big response, honestly. ]
The sky is falling.
You reach towards it. Arms wide, wind snapping cold against your cheeks. If you close your eyes you believe you can feel snow whipping twenty thousand miles above. Brewing in wait, for the right time to fall. Winter in New York begins early, when the leaves turn gold and red in Central Park, and breath frosts up the air like smoke from exhaust pipes of cars gridlocked on 7th Avenue. This is your favorite season, when the city grows grey and the world with it, color bleeding out of the sky and out of the leaves and everything turns slate and ash, a great wasteland, a valley of skyscraper dust. You watch the color die if only to paint it all back with your mind, imagine a city, this city -- yours -- the greatest of them all, spring back alive. In your imagination, your city grows golden and bright, the sky endless and blue above a horizon unbroken by jagged angles and rectangular slopes of the grey one left behind.
Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half.
The golden city is not cut down by the sky, but rises into it. Buildings soar, growing towards tremendous heights, with no horizon splitting heaven from concrete earth. Nothing to separate you from the sky above.
You stretch your arms. See yourself soaring through your golden city, a streak of color in the rising sun reflecting off the mirrored panels of the Chrysler Building, plummeting to ride above the endless stream of yellow taxicabs and cars on Madison Avenue and whipping through the narrow alleys between two high buildings rubbing shoulders, where the smell of rust and garbage passes you by, along with a man in rags rummaging through the trash of high rollers in Italian suits with four-syllable names on fancy labels pressed smooth by women from who-knows-where in matching uniforms who also polish their shoes. They take no notice of you in the wind, so distracted by the lights and sounds of New York, this great glittering city, where even the sidewalks scintillate under the worn leather shoes of the hot dog vendor in Times Square, whose hands are blistered and cracked from the cold and from all the years of dreaming, dreaming, dreaming in this city while writing letters home, sending money and great American dreams.
You dream high in this city, reach beyond the clouds. And there in the stars, the endlessness of possibilities, bursting with heat and light so bright it can blind.
Somewhere, in the midst of all this dreaming--
You fall.
Plummet.
Into the dark --
-- which rocks between a rolling, feverish pitch and a gentle to-and-fro. You have learned to breathe with each rock, each back-and-forth, and it is what you use to tell if you're awake. Sometimes when the rolling becomes too great and your body slams hard against the cold against your side, intense hot stabs of pain blossoming again and again and again down your arm and the side of your face, when you feel something hot and sticky coming out from under your skin, the pain crawls into your insides and aches and gnaws and grinds until you open your mouth and something terrible and burning comes out, wet and hot and reeking so horribly, you do it again and again and again--
until the darkness closes its mouth and everything goes still and silent and you forget to breathe with each rock, because your eyes have closed.
They open.
You have learned to see shadow in the dark. Discover parts of yourself you did not know were connected to you but only felt. You learn the contours of your body this way, shadow appendages that have no name because you don't know how to put together the sounds that come out of your mouth into anything useful at all. They are only noises that you make to hear the echoes of, to break up the black and rocking stillness that surrounds you. Sometimes you hear sounds like the ones you make in the distance, and the rumbling of a great loud booming that shakes and shakes and shakes the walls and hurts your ears.
The rocking stops.
You wait.
Knowing when you are awake or when you are asleep becomes that much more difficult. There is no longer rocking to keep your breath with, and sometimes you're not even sure if you're really breathing, or if it's even necessary. Sometimes you forget, and it isn't until something burns inside and starts to hurt, scratching to emerge from within, that you open your mouth and suck in this great cold gust that calms the heat and makes the badumpdumpdump in your chest stagger back into a steady beat. The air is heavy and wet and carries a scent that tastes like the rolling darkness, but holds itself still.
Ta-tah-ta-tah-ta-tah.
(Rain falls in fat wet drops against metal, a steady lullaby.)
You close your eyes and see the sky for the very first time.
The clouds are dark overhead, and a sea empties itself from the heavens. The city, a wash of grey and hazy lines, blurry like an impressionist watercolor painting.
In a crowd of black, wet petals, a red umbrella emerges.
And under it, a pair of beautiful green eyes.
The sky is falling.
You reach towards it. Arms wide, wind snapping cold against your cheeks. If you close your eyes you believe you can feel snow whipping twenty thousand miles above. Brewing in wait, for the right time to fall. Winter in New York begins early, when the leaves turn gold and red in Central Park, and breath frosts up the air like smoke from exhaust pipes of cars gridlocked on 7th Avenue. This is your favorite season, when the city grows grey and the world with it, color bleeding out of the sky and out of the leaves and everything turns slate and ash, a great wasteland, a valley of skyscraper dust. You watch the color die if only to paint it all back with your mind, imagine a city, this city -- yours -- the greatest of them all, spring back alive. In your imagination, your city grows golden and bright, the sky endless and blue above a horizon unbroken by jagged angles and rectangular slopes of the grey one left behind.
Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half.
The golden city is not cut down by the sky, but rises into it. Buildings soar, growing towards tremendous heights, with no horizon splitting heaven from concrete earth. Nothing to separate you from the sky above.
You stretch your arms. See yourself soaring through your golden city, a streak of color in the rising sun reflecting off the mirrored panels of the Chrysler Building, plummeting to ride above the endless stream of yellow taxicabs and cars on Madison Avenue and whipping through the narrow alleys between two high buildings rubbing shoulders, where the smell of rust and garbage passes you by, along with a man in rags rummaging through the trash of high rollers in Italian suits with four-syllable names on fancy labels pressed smooth by women from who-knows-where in matching uniforms who also polish their shoes. They take no notice of you in the wind, so distracted by the lights and sounds of New York, this great glittering city, where even the sidewalks scintillate under the worn leather shoes of the hot dog vendor in Times Square, whose hands are blistered and cracked from the cold and from all the years of dreaming, dreaming, dreaming in this city while writing letters home, sending money and great American dreams.
You dream high in this city, reach beyond the clouds. And there in the stars, the endlessness of possibilities, bursting with heat and light so bright it can blind.
Somewhere, in the midst of all this dreaming--
You fall.
Plummet.
Into the dark --
-- which rocks between a rolling, feverish pitch and a gentle to-and-fro. You have learned to breathe with each rock, each back-and-forth, and it is what you use to tell if you're awake. Sometimes when the rolling becomes too great and your body slams hard against the cold against your side, intense hot stabs of pain blossoming again and again and again down your arm and the side of your face, when you feel something hot and sticky coming out from under your skin, the pain crawls into your insides and aches and gnaws and grinds until you open your mouth and something terrible and burning comes out, wet and hot and reeking so horribly, you do it again and again and again--
until the darkness closes its mouth and everything goes still and silent and you forget to breathe with each rock, because your eyes have closed.
They open.
You have learned to see shadow in the dark. Discover parts of yourself you did not know were connected to you but only felt. You learn the contours of your body this way, shadow appendages that have no name because you don't know how to put together the sounds that come out of your mouth into anything useful at all. They are only noises that you make to hear the echoes of, to break up the black and rocking stillness that surrounds you. Sometimes you hear sounds like the ones you make in the distance, and the rumbling of a great loud booming that shakes and shakes and shakes the walls and hurts your ears.
The rocking stops.
You wait.
Knowing when you are awake or when you are asleep becomes that much more difficult. There is no longer rocking to keep your breath with, and sometimes you're not even sure if you're really breathing, or if it's even necessary. Sometimes you forget, and it isn't until something burns inside and starts to hurt, scratching to emerge from within, that you open your mouth and suck in this great cold gust that calms the heat and makes the badumpdumpdump in your chest stagger back into a steady beat. The air is heavy and wet and carries a scent that tastes like the rolling darkness, but holds itself still.
Ta-tah-ta-tah-ta-tah.
(Rain falls in fat wet drops against metal, a steady lullaby.)
You close your eyes and see the sky for the very first time.
The clouds are dark overhead, and a sea empties itself from the heavens. The city, a wash of grey and hazy lines, blurry like an impressionist watercolor painting.
In a crowd of black, wet petals, a red umbrella emerges.
And under it, a pair of beautiful green eyes.