Skinny hope

‘Yeah, nearly time. I don’t want to go. These last hours are always the same. They’ll go so fast! Thanks for everything, though.’ He was more whatever he was than ever in those seconds, and I could sense the underlying dazzle. His white-tinged features gave nothing away, the still-dawnish light amplifying the truly disorienting spectacle before me; I couldn’t have described him accurately then... even less so now, with the camouflaging aspect of simple time between myself and those already fragile minutes.

Within those features, a strange quality of materiality that evaded every thought, every possible pigeonhole. Even if I’d seen a vision, I couldn’t have conjured this, a totem from the orient. ‘Listen. I know. Yeah, I know. I’ll think of you, as I think of everyone I meet here. To me, too, it often seems crazy. Ludicrous, these memories. Great memories, all of them. That’s people, you know? You can’t imagine them until you meet them... and many are wonderful.’ He seemed sadder.

These reflections did that to him, offered him some skinny hope, but maybe reasserted and confirmed to him that he couldn’t be what he saw, that he understood an unbridgeable strip between those he gossiped with and his own person. I gathered that’s the cloud that influenced his shadowy fizog. ‘It goes on for me! The days drift towards something... I can’t say what. But I know I won’t have to settle. Boredom isn’t a thing for me here. I sense opportunity all the time.’

I simultaneously kind of understood what he meant and had no clue at all. And I tuned in to a sense of ingrained horror even though his words pointed at a brighter aspect, maybe as an attempt at disguise. His eyes – far-off – betrayed his bonds to the place and another thing too, I’m not sure? Glassy. That smashed me, then. I couldn’t get further. This was a tangled history.

‘I’ll miss everything.’ My voice frail in the morning, an out-of-place chime. Thin words showing nothing. But they dragged there, nevertheless, elevated. I roused myself, as I did around that time of day, and tidied a few possessions, while that figure pondered and drifted through the room. In short time, he was finished. ‘Take care.’ The delicateness of it caught me by surprise, and then his outstretched hand offered a final gesture.

I shook that hand but it was almost weightless, a soft bit of flesh and bone that I can’t say I recognised. Although it wasn’t a long embrace, that after-sensation would be difficult to ever erase. I watched the back of the figure sweep out the room, now lit by a buttery sunshine. I still slumber in the lull that followed – a cavernous emptiness, one that felt correct in those acres of close but distant bigtowers.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12