10:02pm on my break from working a double. Solace in hearing tunes I used to listen to in the darkness of my half lit room between the hours of dusk and garage door rumbling open, eyes half sunken from the effects of teenage depravity and rice krispy edible. The paper leaflet of my tea bag chimes against the metal exterior of my corporate tumbler, my legs are crossed on a concrete block in the middle of the city, and I’m listening to what I can only describe as the croon of angels and drums of cherubs. A concrete block located in the middle of three sister apartment complexes, reminding me of the mythological fates spinning their red thread. A concrete block that encapsulates unfair imaginations of NYC third spaces and that simultaneously is one of the only places outside of Chinatown that reminds me so distinctly of Shanghai.
For some reason nostalgia has been tearing my head apart while also mending all the cracks in the ridges of my brain. For that reason it makes me want to down the sapphire blue bottle of Lao Lao’s favorite liquor as though it were a potion to bring her back. a childhood memory of my grandma disguised in the orbital figure of a vice.
The wind brings me back to the present, fixing my bangs from revealing alleged premature baldness. The somehow metallic ding of my tea tag against tumbler makes me think of the future in the wind chimes that decorate the outside of my dark spruce palace. Imogen Heaps voice melds perfectly with the breeze that both soothes and chills me. The two poles on my right keep scaring me into thinking they are very tall humans - it both reassures me that they are not, while frightening me into the idea that I am actually just very small, skin and bones, against the clang of metal.
A peek at the sign tells me I’m in an oak grove far from the one I used to bike towards at the brink of dawn