Distant craft

Lightlocked

Waking early into Valentines’ glaresnow. My eyes are scorched by the burnfrosts, and I stumble dazed from the flat. The incredible cloud-drop rugs the mired forests of Brockwell, which flows away from the eyeline until it vanishes into a tarpaulined nothing-there mash. Draped in winter. Outside I stare through the space blizzard, picking out the laser eyes of vehicles and distant craft on the barren distances. Snow conceals craters and cracks filled overflowing with soily Kit Kat Chunky wrappers and Magners bottles. Somewhere in the staticflicker, outlines muddy the clearness but they fall away quickly and I can barely see them, if I can see them at all. The closeness is all cold. Rolling my eyes around and continuing to pick out nothing as the silence cooks paranoia, and there’s only one or two other-dimension car beeps.

The snow dusts on all the estate blocks and the vans and the electricity wires, but the bathroom lights peep through, torches for lone wolves foraging in the space lands for undercover subsistence. I start to think I’m a god as the hail thrashes through, and flash in retrospect what I’ve done and where I hope those experiences and memories will lead me. How can I indulge them in order to shape the future? I expect the close portion to be littered with these murky snowshowers too. The topography is difficult. I have no up-to-date map, with only the whitedrifts and undulating levels to guide me to the near-invisible islands of grocery stores and hot chocolate-steamy cafes that act as legendary hideouts for every single urban Eskimo, concealed by their furry circles; they are just shadowy eyes.

Eventually, I will see them as they start to look back at me through the barricade of frost, with the blurred stars of clocks and coffee machines. And I’ll make out constellations with my finger and the Eskimos will look on with a pie of excitement and confusion through their mugsteam, and possibly the brief note of something other. How do I get there? Radiosignals are the rustling of tinfoil and they rush the spectre of quiet terror into a galactic hugepark. Alien DJs mix their noise crackle words within the otherwise uninhabitable wind-bowl. Inter-world mesh that somehow forms poignant patterns, playlists in the midst of the deathblizzard chaos. I am not dreaming this, am I? The dreams I had resembled these perfect white fields that flowed through the night and brought with them a fantastic glare, meaning they were not there for touching, instead there to be watched from the distances that themselves were distorted due to the top-layer floor-thin fog that was the border of everything.

Was that even a dream? Or was it simply the tangle of sheets, a little river of linen in the darkened room? Or did the sheets get intermingled with the outside, which was seeping into the cracks of the walls, the boom of icicles and sleet pushing against what was previously hospitable, battering me out of slumber and directly into the Polar sands, the bedding mixing and dissolving into this mush. My face and beard – or is it just the face and beard in my dreams? – becomes soaked into the ceiling snows.

Sludge. Now I know I am definitely awake, I can feel the primal coldness on the inside of my mouth, tongue, throat. I know I am definitely outside when my face begins to crinkle from the frosts and my hands harden in my pockets. Surprisingly, the sun momentarily forces its way onto this platter, turning the white layer a peachy orange colour, a shade that is as perfect as it is unobtainable. The light also seems to unlock many of the puzzles that had recently been iron in toughness, throwing off the blueish rough that was an unnecessary hat for these boroughs. A very welcome re-tuning of the vibes. Now I’m gliding along the strips, with landmarks visible on the lit parts of the horizon. So that’s where they had been hiding! They look like the gateways of other galaxies, pristine and cold in the freezer sun, in fact, looking not even like real buildings, looking made of cake mixture in the fresh light.

I knew that this would be worth it, even though the ice winds will be carving sub-zero pain right into my uncovered parts, mainly the face, and also the small white gap between my gloves and my coat. I hear further chatter between zones, but it’s all so ambiguous I can’t tell if the murmur is human or something a bit more obscure. Got it. No, it becomes another gradual slide into unfathomable mutterings. Whatever they are or what they are saying it is a nice layer of noise that tries to warm up relentlessly glacial surroundings. Soon my snowboots, which look to claw into the shifting, uncertain ground, are totally covered in the feathery tiny bits, from what is still falling from the purple-white sky.

A beacon in the otherwise deadly lands, the pub shines homely light onto the grey ground, strips of buttercup glory. Already I’m getting frostbite and a few heads turn as I tumble into the baking room, which is lit by huddles of candles. That throb of sifting air when you enter a room having come in from the Arctic nowheres. I take a while to get accustomed to it, and it seems the dimensions of the room are not defined, and keep altering as I’m looking around. This dizzies me out even more and for a little bit I think I’m going to go weak at the knees and tumble to the floor.