Arcadia

51

In a city without seasons, stars fade under a blur sky, never make it into constellations, thoughts fall short and words are never enough. And yet, it still takes words to make a song. Ashtrays filled with endless empty evenings, that smell vaguely of street-lights and museums and sweat. Museums built by the history-makers to house the dead, but ours is too full of life, of delighted schoolchildren out on an excursion, of pretentious teenagers reaching out far beyond the blur sky of what they are, of lovers who have scoured the city and sought the corner out for a sanctuary, of their kiss, and of us. We, the observers of the universe, we sit together of empty evenings and talk of art. Art may be sublime, but I have found eternities in blank grey pages, in children's books with yellow covers and in lullabies. I read books about death till the words get blurred, I read till I can't feel my skin. You have lived other lives, all of them but my own. I have been a wildflower that grows in the graveyard, you have been the green in winter and the wilted in spring. I have lived till I couldn't any more, and you have long been dead. As the wise ones say, life is not symbolic, it has no meaning. Life is meant to be suffered, endured, lived, for its own sake.

We have decayed in the silence between our breaths, we lost our souls in the infinite little infinities between zero and one.