Chapter 1
The adjacent train flashed through the windows like a zoetrope, capturing the preoccupied passengers in freeze frames. They looked beaten down by the towering oppression of the city’s industrial district. I turned to my partner and remarked ‘rough lookin’ people’ though they looked worse than rough.
I had walked all day through a sickly malaise, the kind that feels like sandpaper on your nerves. I was now in the thick of it, slumping into my stiff seat like tar rolling down a telephone pole. The strobing sight of the grimy underbelly of the city made me ponder. It made me ponder the ugliness of our urban manifest destiny, our need to spread.
I felt in that moment the utter repulsion of being in this skin. I cursed the instinct of perseveration, our binding fear of ends, instincts tight as this skin. My lungs:black. My bones: brittle. My being: despicable. Then, in a flash just slow enough for the arrangement of light to stay behind my eyes, I saw them. A pastel dress and the two most shimmering faces. Winding like vines: blonde hair. Reflecting the sky: green freckled eyes. Refilling my life: one blue daisy covered dress clinging to its pristine figure. The curve of their necks, the tilt of their heads, the voluptuousness of their chest, everything complimented the whole of their body.
Their shared estate provoked electric yearning behind my eyes and thumping wine in my chest. I had glimpsed a miraculous accident and at once felt the privilege of being. I glowed with what the greeks would have termed agape, and what the west calls spirituality. For the remainder of the ride to Dekalb Station I was motionless, but my soul climbed higher and higher in my stiff seat like bubbles in a bath. I felt. And I felt fully. The day was now an era and I was now new.
