(chris’s) blog

I’m sitting still, empty through unrealized words of my body. In this stillness the ambiance of my surroundings is sensed undetermined. I find peace and gratitude is not forceful, appreciated.

hotel balcony, Brisbane
Originally uploaded by Well Wisher

A white building with many black windows and black balconies with metal shaped like lace stands in the city night. There is a terrible noise growing from the street level, of automobiles and stiff, leather boots and people shouting their different lives at one another. The light too is a mess: a stoplight turns from red to green, a butcher’s window glows blue, and a ladies’ fashion store is as bright as white has ever been. The streets are impossible with impossible life.

Up high, on one of the balconies lies a person, spread out on the cold surface of the overhang. The hang, it blocks out the terrible noise, the miscalculated light, and leaves only that which the person chooses: a single lampshade, and a radio, playing a tune too faint to be understood as anything more than not silence. It is pleasing and causes a smile.

Inside, a lover sleeps in the comfort of the fluff and the darkness, the eyes slowly twitching with a dream. No sound can be heard from the world outside, and no electric freezer dins so prolonged we forget it is not silence — it is quiet as nature intended. The face might be smiling, the mind a mess of thoughts from the day: of light and sound, of reds and blues and whites, of motor engines and lives shouting at one another — an impossible mix; the impossible beauty of a dream, projected as the street below.

I tapped out beats on the steering wheel with two friends in the car; the radio sounded smooth and the air felt cold. My friend next to me yelled at three girls walking by while the other ducked under the window, embarrassed. I remembered being fourteen and having a pen thrown at me from a car full of high school seniors. It was finally funny as the girls scurried away toward a parking lot full of loitering suburban kids. Somebody drove by with flashing lights under their car and a larger radio somewhere disrupted our mood, if only for a moment.
We had no plan and nothing to do at all. All suggestions would have been dismissed because, we assumed, they wouldn’t be entertaining enough, but now I see that we perhaps reveled in our inaction. The radio sounded smooth and the air felt cold. We were young, happy and healthy, and it may have been one of the best times in our lives.