♥ {confessional, sweet battle && interrupted thoughts} ♥

crystal palace is burning down, burning down.

(posted on Friday, March 20 by eii wyy nae.)

Clouds of purple and red dress up the sky in the colour of winter. They move with the wind only to breed and multiply, a drifting bruise across the skyline. Roofs damp from afternoon rain have become charred by smog, bleak as wet coal. Starlings balance on chimney tops, singing as if their lungs are trying to burst out of their bodies, desperate to become separate, subordinate, to be something other than a blur of black on the horizon.

A Church tower pierces through and above the silhouettes as if pointing up to something significant. Still, it drowns inside the big blue above and is forced to sit in the uniform grey of London, rendered ambiguous fighting for distinction. Idiosyncrasy doesn’t come for free here, so the lampposts stand in a front-line along the street, leaking light onto cardboard box houses built against their stems. Inside, hands hide behind the stains of other peoples soot.

My fingers, elastic with warmth inside these gloves, twist the stem of my apple as I make my way through the alphabet with each turn. It breaks at ‘L’ and I can’t think of anyone other than Leonard who lives down the road from us with his grandmother, in the house with the green door that is always ajar. He broke his leg last summer from letting his bicycle run into the back of a car. There is still a limp in his step, we used to laugh but now I just feel nothing when I see him. I don’t think he even knows my name.

An unexpected gale shakes the letter from my mind as I button the coat I’d thrown around myself in a hurry after dinner, wrapping the scarf around my neck and head. Muddling our way through with eyes squinting, our words are lost in the wind’s vacuum that reduces everything to a ear piercing whistle. All else is mute, silent, lip-read and un-sub-titled.

The street ahead looks like the blackboard on our kitchen wall, waiting for chalk to make a mess of itself. Nothing separates in the night, everything is as everything else is: completely enveloped in shadow. Oil and water. Puddles hug the curb, deep with the ink of November. The air, a claustrophobic jam, has blocked my nose and it hurts like hell to inhale. I sneeze a grey mess onto my sleeve. My balance off, I trip over my own feet as we walk across the cobbles that remind us of the sugared almonds we sucked until our tongues turned ulcer red last August at that wedding of that couple our parents knew when they were just like us. I like the way the arch of my feet curve over the stone: ball and socket. *apakans* lols.

Time beats against my rib cage until it is all I can hear and my ears ring with the sound of impatience. The scarf around your neck brushes against my face. You smell of LO-UH-VE.