Beats and memories

I step onto the bridge, I rise up the steps, I feel the breeze around my ears. It’s the winter gust again. I don’t just feel it, I smell it. Almost a clean break. The shudder of the jamboree and the last remnants of the scattered beats slowly melting away, replaced immediately by the pale memory of them. Beats and memories.

I’m across the bridge and into the sludge, leaving only an accidental trace behind, that of the crumpled euphoria. Just some burnt-on motion; the afterglow tattooed on the innards of my eyes. After a few more yards the rain starts falling. Skinny shards of wetness blanketing me and transporting me solemnly from my deep transitory revelry.

But with little resistance I submit to it. I know my fate. Perhaps those heights were in existence only as a blip, to make every normal day bearable. A short-time lozenge to diminish the agony of the norm for just those days. It’s safer for me to accept what’s happening and go along with the drift. I know that I have to leave. If I spy the veiled route again, for that ‘third chance’!, I will ignore it, because ultimately the pain is too intense. Even this second chance feels weird, it’s not real enough, and to replicate a moment in time breaks too many rules.

And then once more, and fast, visibility drops right down, I’m deep in the mush, with only veiled illuminations popping up and then dropping down in the mist. Damp clingy smell. The people have all but vanished, just ricocheting knocks and scrapes, life distorted, acuteness veiled.

The industrial soupy city that never ends. It resounds in communal dreams and I’m back to the person I was before. Even huge billboards are muffled by the surrounding murk, they jump out briefly before falling away to dullness. Winter accelerates, occasional headlamps knife through grey, and I’m left on the bridge, drifting into solitude.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10