Cold Light

Gregory
Gregory
Aug 9, 2017 · 2 min read

The sun shone brightly overhead and as he passed a cafe he thought he heard the hunger of angels deep down in the pits of their singing voices, buried beneath the most beautiful colors of emotions and a pound of makeup. “So blunted and boring”, he thought. He stepped over a sewer drain that was wide enough to permit passage almost too perfectly the size of a child’s sneaker, or perhaps the paw of an urban cat, cool, though surely the animal would be more familiar with these streets than the denizens living disconnected up above. Neighbors and friends. One of the windows belonged to a woman he had developed a relationship with, a mother-son sort of thing. She would bake him banana-bread on the weekends, a gesture he accepted not because he was gentle nor aware of her fragility, but because in the repetitive black voids caused by the blinking of his eyelids we was searching for a variety of warmth that only existed within the unknown breaks from the familiarity of the nightmare, and her gift of wheat and flour somehow resembled the Dramamine required to remedy the dizziness of switching back and forth. He would only eat half though, because his gluten free lifestyle demanded this type ofunnecessary self-improvement regimen.

The sun shone brightly in his eyes through the windows as he climbed the stairs to his room. He could hear the angels singing from below, muffled as the heat of the music rose through the cracks in his floor, the chinks in his armor every time he would bring a girl over and see the superficial disappointment residing in and filling up the wrinkles of her face, which is why of course, they always looked so young. He would sit on the edge of his bed, listening to them while he faded in and out of consciousness. The days tired him more than he felt they should, yet he refused to consume ephemeral energy that he thought would have long term consequence for his health, and so he found that he never actually lived in the moment, but rather in the decrepit future they tell you about in pharmaceutical commercials.

The moon shone brightly as he walked out the door, meat and bone and concrete bathing in the natural blue, he pulled out his cellphone and then quickly returned it to his pocket. A woman approached and whispered in his ear, the sound barely audible, he felt the coolness of speech constrict the blood vessels in his hands and feet, and he startled at the sensation as her blood attempted to warm his back up. They walked hand in hand for several minutes until around midnight. Now her hands were as cold as his, an effect they probably should have anticipated. He could hear clearly now the hunger in her voice now that the singing was absent from it. The moonlight burned their skin as they walked back home.

Gregory

Written by

Gregory

American living in Shanghai, China. Writing on politics, bitcoin, philosophy, current events, and Greater Asia.