The air rushed around me in a cackling cacaphony of colorful voices, garishly visible like grotesque bony appendages protruding from a terrible atrocity. It was like a movie, with the background noise growing louder and louder and the static getting clearer and clearer and the subject getting lost somewhere in between, drowning in a sea of its own poor confusion. People rushed in as the snip of a scissors rang through the air, and I saw two people rush to the precariously waving speakers and hold on for dear life, static masts over waves of bobbing heads, detached and still moving up and down while bodies with L.L. Bean backpacks rushed in and grabbed their prizes with somewhat sticky hands, like from Cracker Jack boxes and cereal bags.
Spotted neon signs lit the night, and as everyone was muted down in the van, full and content and introspective as we left those other lives aside on the highway. An used car lot shone a cold white wash over a field of glisteningly dormant cars, waiting to be fed and drove and felt, while the sign above raged on cluelessly about unrelated things, babbling incoherently. I could tell that they just wanted to sleep.
We were late, but the doors opened swiftly, and all of a sudden I noticed that some leaves on the trees were gone. All of a sudden I noticed only a few people amidst the books, and before I knew it we were walking briskly, then running, the wind whipping through our faces and rushing up our noses and curling past our ears. I breathed in, deep, and something whispered "winter".
"You know what?"
I had to say it, because winter was on my mind and my heart was beating wildly, because the incessant pounding in my ears was overwhelming me that I had to let part of myself go, because otherwise I would burst, and so I let it free. At that moment, his face slipped away, and I was in a corridor looking behind myself at the wall then this then that and my tongue slipped away and from somewhere else I heard a voice saying, "Deja vu", and I tried to grasp it as it sped out of my mouth
But at that instant I realized that it was almost what I had wanted to say, so I left it spiraling upwards. Left behind, I traced its path with my index finger, like so many of the rubber carnival balloons that you had flown into the sky, sent off on journeys, bearing gifts, a adolescent sacrifice that popped somewhere else, never to be found. Soak the prints in developer for a minute, but the image develops in a quick five seconds. A single phase in a lifetime, passing by and clearing out before your eyes, instantaneous gratification after delayed reaction. Someday, soon, the leaves outside my window will do the same.
Perhaps someday, we will say, "Someday, our children will do the same, again."