She closed her eyes.
She looked through the looking-glass, and saw a cityscape - glistening, like the transient spray of a waterfall. Refracting light, surrounded by an ocean of azure blue water. Sharp and brilliant, ebullient and enduring. It looked like a place that could be lived in, should be lived in. A place where heroes wore their identities not on their masks, but on their sleeves. A place where you could never trip, never stumble or fall or scrape your knee - because there would always be the zip of a suited figure through the air, ready to offer you a guiding hand through the concrete jungle. One shout was a call to rescue, and there would always be the safety net perching below to receive her should she fall.
It was a place she could - would, should - be living in. It was a place, she'd imagined, where she could finally live her life as it should be - full and not underpinned by regret or liquid guilt. It was a place where the good were greater, and the great were the greatest. There was no stinking fear of death, no crippling fear of rejection.
She imagined walking through the streets - bright, crisp, ever-spring air snaked between towers, through streets. Her, a normality amongst a crowd of thousands, dewy-eyed and buzzing and alive. No fear of the future, no regrets from the past. Whenever she felt lost among the sea of millions, a kind, giving hand from a masked figure would extend towards her and offer her compassion, solace. And she'd close her eyes and feel wanted, feel loved, feel at home once again. Weren't these the constituents of the primal thirst of humans?
She opened her eyes.
If she listened carefully, the city buzzed. Not loudly - but just loud enough to be conceivable. The kind of thrumming that you could hear from your heart if you sat in a silent room, raw and bloody and bare. The kind of hum that was low and monotonous and served as a tired reminder that you were still alive. The kind of hum that could be heard at the end of a silent phone line, on a solitary walk after heartbreak. The sound was like white noise, but the living and breathing sort. A stab in the back, a stone lodged in the throat.
The longer she stared, the more the city changed.
Sometimes, she saw shadows creeping in back alleyways as she imagined trotting along. A zip past, a quick escape. Ominous rolling thunder from the blue sky above, and the rumble of electricity beneath her feet. The sea of people came and went, and then at instances disappeared together entirely, like the ocean before a tsunami. She was driftwood caught in the unrelenting current. Skyscrapers echoed with the ghosts of the future, flashed with a pile of growing carcasses donning masks and capes.
She'd pull out a desperate, needy hand and would not receive anything in return.
She jerked out of the looking glass.
When she'd returned to herself, she no longer saw the city - but her own reflection. It was ragged and tired, and bloody and delirious and broken all the same.
And this was how the end started: how reality and existence and love and poetry and death had begun unravelling for her. How the anxious realisation that there was no safety net, no scintillating city, no superficial aura of serenity. There were no heroes or villains, no boys or girls who loved her in this city no matter how much she thought they meant to her. No matter how many nights were spent peeling open each other's hearts and stitching them back together as if it were the surgery to cure or remedy being alive. No - this, at its core, was a place of cutthroats and heartbreaks. Eerily, the future strung out, and time was the silent omniscient visitor. And eventually, she'd have no one.
This was when she realised: her heroes had faded, and it was time for her to be one. To save herself.
[ THUS A NEW WRITING ERA BEGINS ]
after a good 6 months of existential woes
YOU ARE READING
Stagnant
General Fiction[ collection of things that never really fit, short stories, poems, whatevers ] Things that could be so much more, and yet churned to a stop.
