and the symphonies of light…
Occasionally I get words stuck in my head, like the hook of a song you can’t quite remember but can’t quite forget. Even though I’m sure they’re not original, not my own thoughts they can be applied so beautifully to that particular moment that it loops over and over.
Consider me the Kanye of writing.
Today I wandered over to Union Square after work. While I was sitting there amidst the hustle and bustle it struck me, everything was moving in time with the rhythm of this symphony of light. The words bore a certain cinematic quality. Sitting solitary and decelerating, while all of life seems to quicken around you, the people become blurs, the cars simply streaks of light, the lights in the buildings seemed to all come one and flicker as people sleep or leave or whatever else they might be doing in the darkness…That all flashed into my head in the instant they crossed my mind but I realized that exactly it…
It was all the people. Everyone around me seemed to be involved in some type of city dance. They were the light, the energy the driving force. They were flickering and flashing objects. Some were bulbs nearly burnt out on life, shining like a nova before it becomes a black hole. Some were dim and weak and barely aglow, their eyes sad and safe. Some sparkled like the christmas lights that shimmer all colorful and changing with their own rhythm. It was all there, all inside all of us. All in everyone prepared for fighting or fucking or loving or dancing or singing or stuffing our faces till we couldn’t breathe. All in everyone who had come to New York wanting more and lived in New York taking more, reaching for more, grasping for more. All in everyone who’d been driven mad by the city and seemed to go on and off with their own accord, like haunted lights. Lights of ghost. Some unforeseen force compelling and driving them forward with unimaginable energy. (Oh, the stamina of insanity.) It was all there in the loudness and the rudeness and the loveliness and the loneliness and the beauty. All reaching out, those symphonies of light. Drawing outsiders to us with our radiance. Sirens against the angry storm that is our City. Calling as loud as we could.
When I wander about my place in the city, when I find myself at Union Square just before dusk, in those moments when the air finally cools and the sun is no longer hot against my skin. Just before the lights on all the buildings start to become lit, sitting arm to arm with strangers while the frantic energy of the city in heat swells around me…I feel alive.
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