Turn On The Bright Lights | Teen Ink

Turn On The Bright Lights

January 5, 2010
By Shambler92 PLATINUM, Buenos Aires, Other
Shambler92 PLATINUM, Buenos Aires, Other
37 articles 0 photos 65 comments

Blue on the black-bolt rivulet against the great streets that flush over and over the starry light bouncing off New York City’s chest the smoke of the cigarette flows tightly and swimming plunges within itself and the air, I don’t know how I ended up here, the air is cool and swaying with sea-spray, a salty feel on my cheeks as the wind rustles back and forth upon my hair, here the river quivers rocking back and forth, and back and forth the froth of the frosty riverside cradles smoothly, passing from one shore to the other, from one dead bone to the next and then into the open sea where the grey mist slowly fades and the light before dawn appears, the little waves are birds on each crest, seagulls of the brown waters colliding, dying and resurrecting on the new foam of the Hudson, I leave myself from the cold metal and push my sight upwards and to the east, the gray lightning of the skies preceding the coming of the sun, a line on the horizon, just a line of hope, vague and dripping over my eyes. I sit down on one of the benches under the nearby shadow of the bridge. A concrete wasteland where not even the bums dare to populate with their snoring, just me and the pigeons crooning and goose-stepping, flapping their wings one with the other and flying over the rolling steel and gone beyond the towering bricks. I like NYC in the mornings, one would expect a bunch of people building one over the other to reach the sky and crazy crowds stepping all over you just to cross the street, but no, there’s a very solemn sensation about the grayness of it all, the sadness of it all when the bells begin to toll on a far away plain and the woods begin to crinkle and crackle under the drops of early morning dew. And there’s a taste of old wine in your mouth, neutralized by every new cigarette you put in your lips, by every fire you raise anew to light it, by every ribbon of smoke you swallow, a taste of worn sheets and melted kisses turned into ashes with the wind, and you could just say goodbye and throw yourself into the river, but I’m not that kind of person, I’m not that kind of person, maybe if I repeated to myself that I am…but alone in loneliness is a pretty dark spot to be in, you wander in circles upon trodden land without even realizing it, a circular path never-ending, the silence here it’s green and brown and growing to the clouds above, branches sprouting out of every bark of bleeding wood, just like that blood that once we dropped too afraid to notice, to afraid to perform our own sacred sanctification, your eyes at that cafe on the Upper East Side so Lower East Side that you attracted those little nosy terriers that came fluffing about from their snob-nose owners, and you would just give them a pad and let them lick the back of your hand, and you had to give them that croissant so that the woman came yelling at us and you laughed and threw one at her, and the sand never felt so cold under my feet, the grass never felt so hurting and aching under my back, the sun never felt so obnoxious to my eyes, and now it is all an aching body, I am an aching spirit, a quiet sufferer on the back of the classroom watching the world go by, so fast and so slow I can’t even catch up with the stabbing wounds I suffer, I can’t even speak, cannot formulate a word because I know the burden, I know the burden and have decided to bear it by myself, to keep on throwing the weight of the world down the mountainside, this wound my own and of none other but me and the shadows of the day, and I know you bear with me, here next to me amongst the sheets of rolling shushing, the blue navigation of pillows, the warm touch of the fingers cruising down my spine, and I know you aren’t gone, that you are still here where the drapes are still not up and all is a vast obscurity in which we perpetrate, and the alarm hasn’t rang yet and the birds are still sleeping coolly against the feathers of night, and ask me this silence, this vast emptiness that surrounds me, the view from the bridge and the blueness of a Sunday morning sun year, gear on the wind-roaring rearview mirror that spits my image right back at me, and the boats are the nothingness dropping against the background of the ducking duckling ducks from the old flowerbed of the river where the feet are entangled with the green tight ropes of the bottom and the arms cannot but plead for the ray-light of the coming morning and the face of a stranger looking at him and at himself spitting him at the same time, so we are all drowning in the, like same old river that guy said the other day at Washington Square while he fed those invisible pigeons and discussed with himself, we don’t step twice in the same river, ???????? ???? ?????? ?????????? ?? ??? ??? ??????????, ????? ?? ??? ??? ?????, we both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not. And I am here in the side of my own annihilation, a side of the road where I look for your face and I clash against the metal immensity of the flow and the birds sweeping, traveling to the east where the earth is golden illumination and all is a big negation surrounding your absence, and your voice echoes still waving from the last yellow meters of the cab, and the lights passing me away, passing, flashing over and over and the hand is always waving into the hazy New York City, and I’m still standing there looking at you, still there looking at you from where I stand, and maybe it is true what you said that day, that maybe we are both under the bridge like in the story but we don’t recognize each other, and the warm morning begins to glow from side to side, and here I am with nothing at all to give you but this lonely silence and this emptiness of sighs, this momentary thought flying over and over, building and crashing, here I am a repetition of those songs we listened to in your apartment, of the cigarettes we smoked by the lake on Central Park, of the books we burned in Brooklyn, we are a useless repetition of our passions, we were and now I am a lonely passion, a lonely flame without its mirror-torch, alone and still in bed, what do I care about this trade winds blowing, this shifting of the ride, this rosy cheeks on the distance, what do I care about the shadow of a reeling, a long winding stretch of wastelands setting me aside from everything, what do I care, but the smell of the drizzle spindrifts outwards, and the shadow of the bridge is Emily back-home, under the bridge with the dawn on the river and Pale Blue Eyes playing on her car and our lips, our lips together and my hand on her dark-brown hair and the blue, deep-blue diamond of the eyes for a moment closed and lost in one flesh and one soul, and now I can’t find your lips and my soul is half-parted and useless, no one’s humming Minstrel Boy upon the sun-showered lawn, no one’s on the other side of this mattress, just me and the waves, the waves entering into the sea, and New York City, NYC, giant splendor of the summer, immense and colossal, NYC, you have always been there as the lovers passed away through the winters and were reborn at spring under the shadow of the trees, you were there before them and will always we there after and remain for those new lovers, innocent and rosy, whispering poetry on each other’s ears without knowing yet the darkness of their future, but cast a light upon me New York City, cast a light now under the windings of the bridge, I should’ve let you fall that night on the bridge, I should’ve let you fall and you would have been an invisible, nameless gust of air fading through the winds, a leaf spiraling into the waters of the river, you should’ve told me it would end like this, with me on the verge of the waters looking directly at you falling, breaking the atmosphere with such solemn silence, but we both knew, we knew since that first moment, we both tasted this death, but you tell me now that when you… maybe when you… then we’ll...
We are the victims of our own faults, of our games, of our hide and seek, of our being lost and found, we’ve been playing Russian roulette for far too long and now we are lost with one only bullet and fate keeps on spinning, and the little screw has sprout out of the merry-go-round and the wheels have stopped, the horses ceased to leap with laughter, and now it’s all a darkness of afterlife lights being turned off by some invisible hand, and you’ll roam on the darkness of the fair looking for a clown, and I’ll die under the hay of the astronomer’s marquee, a cold hand that won’t be touched again, stretched to no one under the stars…


The author's comments:
This is the final part of my novel New York Cares.

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