The lowered sun
The lowered sun fills the whitewashed porch with gentle dry warmth, emptiness that erases the clutter of driftwood and nets, a clarity of submersion that cascades in front of the open door, also swelling with empty luminance. The sun refelects white in a parked auto windscreen. The light falling across the sidewalk rising up between the car and the line of buildings is more rich, has slowed as it penetrates greater depths of floating particulates and moisture. The horizon of the sidewalk is colourless, the sky green where it is met. Always over the crest of the sidewalk the explosions let open by doorways, colours, and reflections subside and slough away. You could not just pause. You wait long enough and the colourlessness washes over you. It moves as you move, although sliding back toward the open water whilst pulling shades down across these upsloping roads. You could not allow it to meet you passively. You could reach it sooner. You wash into the neutrality, the empty colourlessness, if only for that moment before the pressure of detail and stimulation rises again in negative. She penetrates further inland, centerless amongst the crossings and convolutions of the route. She steps away from the open door.
Dense alleys branch rigidly from the sidewalk. The network of city roads is not complex, it respects the logic of unfocused desire. Because the roads do not end there is no real way to go completely missing. You may disappear but you are always on a road. The city is for the comprehensive. Escape from its continuity and redundancy is not acheived through knowledge or familiarity. It is not the city that must be known, for it cannot, it continues on into and beneath the sea, always beyond the horizon, and through every crossing road, the same as before. It is you that must be forgotten. There are no other cities, only different names for the same disillusionment. You must never stop. You may shuffle the names, reassume them, the streets do not change if you touch them all. Touch them all. The soles of your shoes droop with each step. Grind them to nothing. The portions attached to the perimeter of the shoe hand and drag across the pavement. They are ground slowly away. The thickness of the exposed edges is worn to a tapered flap that creeps inward exposing foot and stocking in an expanding ribbon around the perimeter of the shoe. Your foot comes in contact with the pavement. You claim it, you put it behind you, each step further behind. The attached portions of the sole erode on the rising and falling motions of each step, when the foot seeks the ground or evacuates it. The wear comes regionally, where your foot protrudes or presses with more focus. Your balls and heels seek the ground. They tunnel through this protective layer in search of forward momentum. They want distance registered. They seek the pavement as you do, to identify with its solidity.