In a park, reading a book; there’s a roof being painted next-door, and the paint smells like marzipan.

Stepping to the roof, mug of tea in hand, a cloud of gnats or mayflies explodes; dispersing slowly and coming over your face, tangled in your hair they sit in your tea like a hot bath though, it kills them… flicking them out, their waxy wings keeping them surfacing again and again, escaping that wake of surface tension following your searching index finger.

The tangles snag unexpectedly as you move through them, invisible prickles too small for your skin to feel playing out the finer fibers of your sweater, the matted stalks and dry-leaved tendrils of past seasons springy beneath you, as though they sought to propel you beyond the clutching reluctance of their blooming heirs. The stream behind you running clear and quiet, the sky likewise, and each endless, a perfect complement; one ever linear in its perfect obedience to gravity, the other knowing no bounds but diffusion into the hazy, edgeless horizon.

I recognize the sigh. The shoulders as she stands there, the microphone drooping and suggesting to her the attention of the audience, we in chairs fat with stuffing creaking under minute motions. Our motions seek the comfort that ensconces a psyche met with words far worse in their depiction of far graver things than the imagination our comfort cradles. Her voice low, soft and scratchy like the drying leaves of this darkening season. Her eyes cast downward to a glowing slate in hand, her words, the spirit of her exposure, silently resonating through the air at inaudible frequencies. The mic continues its nodding, but many of us stop our motions, and accept the discomfort she gives to us, her voice the disclaimer of impossible pains. She cradles us in her speech.

Walking empty halls under hollow lights, your feet treading the darkened trails worn into the carpet. Hard as wood, dead to echoes, soaking the noise of every step just as the night outside the windows laps up the weak, dithering rays the bars overhead chatter with. The ballast, about to go. A long career of constant illumination only days from exhausted termination. Always drunk up by the night or made to be as nothing beneath the sun.