Lights

Sitting outside, late at night, on my pre-assembled garden chair made from one-hundred-percent whatever-tree, looking up to the stars seems dull and depressing.

The city lights from downtown, no matter how distend and unimportant, blend over the darkness and endlessness of the night. One lonely candle struggling with the light breeze, a glass of cheap whiskey and the rushing sound of passing cars are my only companions right now. The sky, with all its beauty, all its promise for eternity, is faded. Just a washed-out gray on the horizon of my reality.

Maybe it's the whiskey, but right now I'd wish that time would freeze, would savor the moment. That time would end, things would slow down and stop. I want to drown my thoughts, kindling like the flame of the candle, caged in a little glass.

Around me, most lights of the apartments and cute little first-time-homeowner townhouses are off, just here and there a single window glows in static, electric gray. The curtains are shut. I ask myself, do the people around me, the people still awake, feel even remotely the same as I do?

Disconnected, uninspired, isolated from everything, every-day-life affairs.

Probably, I can only guess, not.

From up here on my four-by-eight feet balcony, I can see my car. The piece of Japanese junk. The oil-dripping catastrophe of environmentally unfriendly rust.

Between the railing of my balcony, a spider is hanging in her web, waving with the wind. Just waiting for anything to fly into the her trap. Patience as purpose for life.

Again, my head falls into my neck and I find myself looking into the sky. All those lonely stars. Isolated, all their little brothers and sisters eaten alive by the pollution of false light. They're too weak to shine through, too distant to their relatives, their loved ones. Like an uncompleted picture of an artist, long dead before he could finish his masterpiece.

And around me, no one cares.

Isn't there one genuine soul left out here?

Maybe it's just the whiskey boiling my brain, but right now I want to forget what I know. Who I am. What matters. That nothing matters.

I'm indifferent.

As I close my eyes, I blow out the candle with a gentle kiss of breath. There's a part of me, deep inside, that yearns for something more. For something else. A part, that hopes for all the lights to die like the little candle. A part, that doesn't want me to open my eyes ever again.

Let the world go by, the feelings and thoughts wither in time, like my rusting junk of car. Let the world take me wherever it may. Let my love be eaten alive by an all-blinding ignorance.

Let my soul forget, for all things must end.

And let my heart know: true art comes from within, and it dies long before it's complete.