*

This land is golden. Caramel sun, a little breeze. I’m showered in it as soon as I turn out of the alleyway, into the courtyard where the fountains mirror the city’s sudden blossom into jumper-less days. Everything in bloom. Only bronzed bodies sprawled out on these crisp lawns. A vista melted by smiles.

A this-place-only perfume, with fresh life blown in from the river, a river in full flow. And that sky: plucked from a children’s picture book that tells us the colour of the sky before we know the truth. Now I just want to sit and vegetate too. But I’m injected by excitement at a return to a space I had, in sadness, binned to a hollow no longer reachable. On those winds, on the thin breezes, I can taste a carnival. Just the same as kaleidoscopic ice cream, its various flavours tangible on my tongue.

Towards the river. Through the densely packed jamborees of colour which are like paint splattered across CBD vistas, near the burgeoning tennis courts and rollicking corner tea houses, familiar whirr of helicopters above. The people I see now are those sketched by a dream; no, a daydream to be precise, ones flickering into my conflicted vision as I cling onto consciousness under the warm strands of sun from a September dusk... .

How awakened I am! If there are shadows, they themselves are diluted to almost invisibility by the sun. In front of me. A man. Embracing the day, and nothing more, holding his arms aloft, and grinning a wholesome grin I recall from some soft timelessness in my infanthood, when people were nicer, less threatening.

I do not know this man, but for the glimpse of a second we share a communal joy that binds us to a forgotten haven, or a much-trampled singular spirit. And then he is gone, submersed by that incendiary festival again. I screen-shoot the memory. Because now I’m gone too, a cartoon blur over this mood-scorched terrain, fast-fast, closer to the water.

I see only this small patch of enlivened city. But I know that the energy reverberating in this pocket represents any part of the bigger place now. I sense it flowing in, piercing the cloud. It’s like I imagined but actually better, yet also tinged with the slightest trace of despair. Maybe I added that in later when it actually hit... now though, in this rare moment, vista-to-vista euphoria spreading, a virus, an addictive kick-start.

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