Now she sits on the beach, clothes still damp and encrusted with sand; night has fallen. Twilight creeps clandestine, enveloping the sky in a motley patchwork of blues and purples, and pinpricks of stars begin to emerge. Before her, the city sprawls, a Leviathan metropolis of metal and steel; though it is still silent, lights begin to illuminate the skyline.
How do the city lights shine, even as the people are still? She wonders. How much of the world will continue without them?
The cityscape reflects on the water and the scintillating glow of yellow and white blur together before her eyes. Beneath the myriad of stars and the vast expanse of darkened sky, rolling waves wash upon the sand like an undulating pendulum; the steady, unfettered oscillation of the ocean.
It is as if she is the last person on Earth.
There are no people here, not in this floating island of hopes and dreams, this junkyard of precious things, this lonely planet of lost tomorrows. She is Adam, first of her kind, alone in Eden; the Rainbow Snake etching mountains across Country; Erebus first emerged from Chaos.
She could be anywhere doing anything, yet here she is, seated before a throne of stars, watching the ocean – it seems the universe has converged into this single moment.
The gentle ebb and flow of the waves, the wax and wane of an inconstant moon, the changing of the seasons; these all mark the passing of time of a world constantly in movement. The numerous incandescent constellations are but a pale mimicry of the blinking city lights reflected on the water, shining beacons of human progression. However, there is a comfort in their evanescence, the fleeting brilliance of the metropolis, yet faint perpetuity of the stars; she is immortalised in them, written into the very fabric of the cosmos.
I am the universe, she thinks.
She is the child, filled with wonder; the mother, reaching for her babe; the slow lonely degradation of the invisible elderly. She is Genesis and Revelations, Alpha and Omega, where the beginning and ending coalesce into a singularity. She is the culmination of countless, immeasurable contradictions and paradoxes that make up her, and her life, and humanity, and the world, and billions of innumerable things, that in the end bear little significance beneath the majesty of the stars.
It is still, save for the gentle ripples of light refracting on the water and the steady rise of her chest.
Does she dare to disturb the universe?
an excerpt from a short story. haha kinda existential but i had fun. also t.s.eliot is great just wanted to say.
#notreallypoetrybutwhatispoetryanyway
