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Ashes and Reverie
Our old apartment, a museum of polished maple floors and furniture steeped in affluence, every piece speaking in the language of wood.
The windows, shy and slender, gave little to the world, but light found its rebellion through the balcony, where I perched to smoke and drown in my own dark musings. The little home, both too much and not enough, gave us a patio and a balcony, as though space could compensate for silence.
I drank vanilla coffee, each sip a desperate effort to sweeten the bitterness of my thoughts, or nibbled at chocolate, a sacrament to keep my mouth from tasting the ash. On the patio, I read tales that mirrored my jagged insides, watched neighbors scuttle like ants, and dogs tug their masters into motion. I smoked, each exhale a prayer, each drag an invocation to forget.
The streets below, narrow, prim, and painted as though they could disguise their own captivity, squeezed between sidewalks tethered to towering homes. Bark and spindly young trees grew in their prisons of steel, rebellion tempered by design. Across the way, a park breathed against the skyline, flanked by schools that churned out futures as though assembly lines could make humans.
In daylight, the park's pulse quickened. Sometimes, it erupted with dance battles, raw, untamed defiance. Groups in baggy sweats and high-tops hurled themselves into the air, hollering to the static-filled rhythm of a stereo. They fought gravity and expectation, their movements painting stories on the canvas of a cracked court.
But I loved it at night, when shadows claimed the spaces between the lights, and the basketball court stood like a shrine to quiet chaos. I sat on splintered benches, an unwilling priest among the faithful, watching the dancers' ghosts linger long after they left. Their art deserved more than this dim recognition, their fire deserved an audience. I thought it tragic that the world couldn't see the brilliance spilling out onto the pavement, and I mourned it, not for them, but for us.
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