Northern Light

One

In some facade of living, this is a house: leaning off the hill, half slantedly riding the weight of the abomination as it sinks inch by inch into the primordial ice. In the style of the area, it moans in the wind with California Dreamin’, chilly grey skies and New York rains tastefully peeling away little flakes of the blue-white housepaint to sprinkle generously atop slipshod gardens dug by mudded shovels and tastefully unkempt lawns. It’s all a charming agglomeration of things, a rich collection of real proletarian material detail preserved in formaldehyde circa Bob Dylan’s heady 1962 and resold to pile up some semblance of culture.

She climbed out from the funerary crush of the blankets, casting aside five or six layers of covering, bought on as many or more different whims. It was late afternoon, the sun occluded by foreboding winter clouds still dripping from the blood of when they slash-and-burned the heady jungle haze of summertime. She sat herself up, looking out through the vintage paned glass, to leaves turning brown, settling softly down on black streets and dead grass. A gnawing pain was nestling deep inside her, feasting as it burrowed deeper to her core, tunneling around her bowels for something to kill. She had only woken up from a four hour nap, an unavoidable blackout after nearly twenty four hours of refreshing the same four apps. She stayed in bed as long as possible, forcing the clock to tick past whatever was so unpleasant about the current moment until her bladder’s aching became unignorable. She forced herself to her feet and stumbled across charmingly drunken whiskey-red wooden floorboards. With a heavy, exhaling drop, she sat down on the ice-cold toilet, reclining into germs reassuringly all hers and hers alone.

Two

With a car you can go anywhere. So she knows in the outer edges of the gradient, accelerating long past town. For all the pretensions to brick buildings and shopping malls and squat little half-skyscrapers while inside the beast the city ends quickly, energies of construction sputtering out into the same off-rural, semi-industrial scrub-forest as everywhere else surrounding the inland sea. The car is full of junk that rapidly degrades as she accelerates, climbing into the red, screaming beyond seductive geometries of great agglomerations, old fabric and unappreciated art, rejected manuscripts that grow like mushrooms from the piles of piles, messes of messes, plastic and metal and paper and wood all heaping up to what passes for a mountain this deep into the continent. Against it all, she commits the ultimate sin, slamming the gas down to terminal velocity, shaking off the baggage of nostalgia and consumption, Ragstock and all the quirky little thrift stores cremated inside her engine pounding towards forgetting. The detritus of too many lives going up in exhaust, her motion follows an order unto itself as she travels along the lines and paths of the interstate’s zodiac. Guided by the asphalt holy book, she fits herself into some celestial hierarchy, eyes glowing, head irradiated by a coronal aura, hands and feet melting apart in blinding light…

And she came back. They always do, just like her, the city rising from the horizon to meet its tumorous child. The car got messier with the radio coming back on, her everything she missed pouring over her, sensation, decadence, pleasure, all accumulating up to overload, a static noise that fell over her as a blanket or a flood, dragging her down into an oceanic sleep, the pressure pounding as it tried to equalize, the great mass of consumable content and the lighter headspace inside trying desperately to equalize so she could dissolve in the waters.

By the time night fell, she was slowfalling down discount-Mulholland, Petula Clark drifting in over once forgotten signals on insomniac frequencies, the universe rejecting our junk, sending it back to us, doubling it over and over in dreamy images that all come together in an easy composition of reality to paste over any unpleasantness that might come in through the eyes. Back in the city, she fell asleep like they all do, dancing in the theater on the hill, where the city lights flare up in incandescent glory over empty storefronts, a cool old timer’s strip, the sea flooding into every house and washing away every timber erected on the precarious shores - not that it matters, with everyone still lost in reveries and fits, as the sea and the topography is wont to inspire. She stumbles out of a parking garage and sleepwalks down the sidewalk, only missing the Empire State building and Hollywood Stars. Like any city worth its salt, it has its alleys and darkness, carefully cultivated shadows in corners where the people all come out from uphill middle class prejudice and downhill opiate misery to dance in the backstages and under-bridges, enjoying the spectacle of some real urban grime.

Creeping in step to her particular music, she settled into the old routine, roots down in the backstage among the silk and cotton and rayon, musty with the smell of having been neither worn nor washed in years. They all come and go, just as she does, leaving it behind to pile up and accumulate a few feet higher. Only half of them are employed at the theatre itself, the rest coming and going without much reason, just an open door and an invitation to stumble in - a place to sit, throw your wrapper in the corner, toss a bottle over the rafters, let your needles and spoons settle in your own comforting filth, let all the wreckage of your life, the bits and pieces of nonsensical errata building up as your own miniature castle.

By 11 she paid her rent and tossed her abjection to the darkened corner, exiting out of the entire production back to the off-broadway of her own home to find something closer to the source.

Three

She left the cul-de-sac to roam the city. It was getting into dusk now, the sky turning to muted darkblue, the sun having just sunk below the horizon. She caught the bus and rode it to the station, boarding another circuit, leaving at its farthest reach, absorbing into a distant copy of her own home neighbourhood. She strode on, between the patchwork of fences and the road, a five foot strip of grass to make do where they never expected to need a sidewalk. Closed off fortresses were stalkingly dotted all along her path, a school, a golf course, an industrial park, an oil refinery, grain elevators, zones and districts haphazardly fitted together in oddly sized rectangular sections, divided by empty streets and concertina wire populated by roving bands of murderously intentioned automobiles. She ducked off the main road into a flood ditch, hiding herself away from the flat plateau above. When she reached the river, she sat down, dangling off a concrete precipice before the water trickly softly to flow North to the pole. This city was different. It was better for her to be here. Unlike the metropolis, its age and mass compressed inwards until it sprouted culture, unlike the maritime city where occult waters and strange hills sent everyone into reveries and theatrics, the industrial zone barely existed. She was walking through an artifice, a paper mache facade staked with tent poles into the frozen prairie. The winds howled most days, so hard it seemed as though the city would just blow away. Less than a city it was a rest stop with 100,000 people, a place for cars to pull in on their way across the interior continent. As she dodged cars and wove between buildings, she sunk deeper into the ways of the primordial landscape, becoming an aimless nomad, moving for movement’s sake. She was alone, in a way deeper and more unchanging than any mere isolation can offer. Time seemed to slip away with all the other details, sidestepping an aberration barely a hundred years old, temporarily transplanted onto the frozen steppe. As the night grew to darkness, the stars lasted forever, a gradient to endless blue day, sweeping with wind as she became a cirrus cloud, nothing except disintegratory geometry guiding her to that final, forgiving zero.