The Sunrise
It's really hot, and intermittent rains don't make the air cooler. What they actually do is increase humidity, so it feels more and more like a tropical jungle with dense overheated air saturated with vapor. Inside, it's like a sauna. When the air cools down, late at night, a dense mist begins to creep around, enveloping tree crowns like a translucent ghostly octopus, slow and mysterious. If somebody wonders about Sunday, I indeed walked around the city till morning, and I indeed met the sunrise. I actually don't remember when was the previous time I met the sunrise; it would be funny if it's my first time ever. At eleven pm my brain boiled and was about to explode, releasing clouds of vapor, when I staggered through the chanting crowds with honks, shouts and loud brassy blares piercing reality around me, preventing me from catching my train of thoughts that finally dissolved into tatters and shreds. Everybody was caught in some fever, and my inner vision once again focused on a hot succubus of a girl moving in undulating coital waves, her dark and curly unruly hair swinging wildly, emphasizing smooth accelerating patterns of her motion. A muscular swarthy guy behind her followed that rhythm complementing it with his moves, which eventually created this sensual harmony of a dance. Which just as well could be a passionate and artistically performed copulation in other circumstances, which made me think of this similarity and connection between dance and copulation, and between dance and spiritual world of spirits, populating fiery upper regions of eternal dance, and eventually, between copulation and spiritual stuff. Like, maybe because sex is just another form of dance with a single point of energy and focus, which eventually allows people to connect to something spiritual. Or not. This is a weird train of thoughts, but maybe this is what usually comes to mind when you are sober and calmly observe people in a club at the moment when a wild rhythm of music pulls everybody into this ecstatic state of mind, body, and soul. When you are sober - when everything around is getting hotter: sounds, colorful palette of sensual light in the semi-darkness, bodies with imperceptible sweat beads of moisture appearing on smooth soft tanned outline of woman's shoulders somewhere in front of you, and you feel the sharp spicy fragrance of tropical flowers that bloom at night somewhere in the jungle - one of the things that pass through mind is what exactly you are doing, or what is the trajectory of your actions or inaction here. Everybody just caught up in the moment; this glowing sensual atmosphere has a strong pull, dissolving thoughts and filling eyes with passion and soul with the longing for something wild. Then a shot of something strong strips you from the remaining rationality - this scaffolding with plaques explaining what's right or wrong or stupid - and you just go with the flow, dissolve into a dance and this sultry strong embrace of humanity, and then events and circumstances carry you along; you don't navigate this route anymore, it carries you as some sort of a mountain river, only in this analogy this river is more like a stream of lava with the heat blurring your thoughts and understanding of what's going on.
Ok, I digress, yes finally I met the sunrise, and it was strange. I thought: was it my first time when I saw the sunrise or not? It would be strange, but maybe not so much, considering that I live in a huge metropolis where light pollution obscures the stars at night. Or maybe it doesn't, I just cannot see them because of my shortsightedness that developed during those years when I peered intently into white scrawls of formulas on the blackboard, and then later when I peered into dense columns of figures in the excel sheet. Those were two different times and moods, but what unites them is that I didn't look at the stars or thought about watching the sunrise. There were always too many other important things to care about. Or were all those things important? Or it was just an ever-present fear of missing out and passion for both knowledge and making money. Knowledge is power, or I would paraphrase it - knowledge has power over people - a certain pull, gravity that captures your imagination and pulls you inside, when you want to explore and learn more, and a depressingly mundane outline of everyday life fades like a dull cloudy winter day somewhere outside this seductively lit cavern of miracles. It's dark here, but colorful flashes dance on the walls, and you get deeper and deeper, and you discover some treasures. And you want to discover more, and you can travel through those passages indefinitely, reaching more sacred places and altars.
Ok, I digress, I finally met the sunrise, and maybe it actually was the first time. In other time, I would try to travel through the collapsing corridors of my memory and figure out was it indeed the first time, but it's hot, and my brain is like a jellyfish melting in the sun. All I can do right now is stringing these words together, and the words define the direction of my thoughts, not the other way around. In other words, my head is empty apart from a scattering of vague recollections about the sunrise. So I keep typing words and each sentence gives me an idea about the next sentence that can be disconnected from whatever I've written before. But I don't have a clear picture in my mind. In some way I trudge through the fog, gradually revealing outlines of what I want to say. I wonder how I'm going to do my work. I would never expect this degree of brain collapse back then, but once again, shit happens. Maybe I should alter my brainstorming strategy and let myself flounder and crawl around, gathering scattered thoughts and ideas like minuscule pearls and beads strewn across the sand. The apartment is in a permanent under construction state with spare decks, rolls of wallpaper, sheets of decorative siding, and buckets smeared in dried plaster evenly distributed everywhere. The guys who came to replace heating pipes and radiators decided that renovations are still in progress. Well, sort of. Maybe one day I decide to settle into some sort of comfortable existence and bring everything into a state of conventional coziness. Like, maybe hang the carpets on the walls, stuff like that. So far, everything looks like something temporary, and I kinda like it that way. It reminds me that I didn't grow roots deep inside this place and situation, didn't get attached to some comfort of everyday existence, when multiple days and nights coalesce into a speedy blur of time, ending somewhere in a gray zone. So far, nothing surrounding me looks permanent at least.
Ok, I digress, well, the sunrise...
Well, the sunrise. When I escaped noisy crowds and crossed the bridge into the night - the approaching darkness of the park stretching along the river - it was a half past eleven. I thought about a subway station located somewhere in the middle of my route through the park. Normally it would be closed at one in the morning. There was no way I could reach it in time, so if it indeed closed at one, then there was no way back. I couldn't catch a taxi with whatever cash I had at that point, not if I wanted to buy some food, lemons, and cigarettes in the morning, which was imperative. Although some said that the subway closed at three on some days during the football celebration, so I decided that whatever was the case, it would define my further course of action. If the station was closed when I reached it, then I indeed had no other option than to walk until morning - five or six-hour walk. It didn't sound very intimidating, but I suddenly became self-conscious about my shoes and some slight ache in my right foot. If it got worse, at some point I'd need to interrupt my walk; I would get stranded sitting somewhere waiting for the morning and trying to stretch my five remaining cigarettes for as long as possible. It felt boring and kinda defeated the purpose of what I planned, so I was nervous about my foot and hoped that ache would pass or at least it wouldn't get worse. Like, I didn't take such long walks for a long time. Later I walked along the river through the eerie darkness of the park and forgot about my worries. Just because the stream of consciousness took me on the ride, twisting and swerving in different directions, and I thought about many things at once. Like how fifteen years ago a walk through the night felt like something adventurous and made me extremely nervous. Hard to tell why, like, I generally was on high alert, expected somebody would jump me, all the time, something like that. And everything looking unusual felt somewhat disturbing. Like central streets without the usual stream of cars - eerily empty like it was some strange dream I stumbled in. Maybe everything I did that wasn't within the conventional boundaries felt strange and somewhat dangerous. Although it was irrational. Just a deeply ingrained habit to follow some rules and conventions. Like when you sit on a stool, leaning on its backrest and slightly rocking back and forth, then you lose balance and fall back. Technically it's safe, you fall on your back from a low height and the backrest protects your spine. Although all your instincts scream danger. This is something related to evolution, and it's irrational; the same way I felt some irrational fear when I diverged from a typical conventional sequence of actions and events. Then years passed and all the conventional boundaries were getting more and more blurry and uncertain.
It was dark in the park, and the veil of mist hung on tree branches like an oversized spider web. I noted that it was half past midnight and it was still warm, almost hot. Even here near the river where in the evenings it normally gets chilly when the sun crosses the horizon. Maybe it's not so in the middle of July. I saw the mist crawling through the lush foliage of tree crowns and I felt like I was in some tropical forest. It was the middle of the night, and it was warm, and the air was humid and sticky. The lights were out, and I walked along the darkness of the river embankment, eerily illuminated by the reflections of far away lights. Sometimes my thoughts obsessively returned to the ache in my right foot and how out of shape I probably was for a five or six-hour stroll without any opportunity to cut it short. Or just this thought of irreversibility of my decision to spend the night walking made me nervous. Probably anything can make one nervous when there's no way back; it's also in human nature, I guess. In my case it was the subway station - it could be closed or it could be open; reaching this point of no return produced this irrational anxiety, I thought maybe if it was still open I should have just taken a ride home, walking all night was a weird idea, and I was out of shape for five hour stroll in the darkness, and my foot hurt, and all that - when I reached the station at half past one, and it was closed, it was a relief. Like crossing the point of no return. And I realized that I was eventually going to see the sunrise. This was something that was going to happen three hours later, and before that, I could just keep going through the darkness and anticipate. At that point, darkness was replaced by the row of bright streetlamps, illuminating the road along the river. The river reflected the lights of the stadium far away on the opposite bank, and I felt a bit of melancholy about all the football fever and the stream of impressions that officially came to an end. Although it was still the middle of July, and the feverish summer heat (both literal and metaphorical) was in full swing, and there were no sobering gusts of autumn wind, and chilly evenings, reminding about the grave seriousness of life and everything related to it. Summer makes everything less serious, less important. During winter I think about death, its real possibility, about transient nature of everything, about obligations, the pain of losses, and other depressing shit. In summer all this doesn't matter, well, because it's hot, and also the endless stream of semi-naked people is an ultimate distraction. Then the level of testosterone reaches a point when everything outside the context of carnal desires seems somewhat irrelevant.
I estimated the distance and decided that in two or three hours I'd reach a certain picturesque spot that was also high above the city level, so it would be a perfect spot to watch the sunrise. My brain apparently didn't work well, so it didn't occur to me that that spot actually faced west. In fact, it came to my mind because I saw sunsets there many times while I walked from work on foot. It's not like I worked somewhere nearby, I just liked to walk; usually, it took about three hours to reach that spot, then another two hours to get home from there. Yes, it probably sounds weird. Maybe it's another form of escapism, a way not to feel trapped inside a hamster wheel with rapid daily back and forth commutes between home and work and nothing in between. Conventional stuff. As I said, at some point all conventional boundaries and norms got blurry and unnecessary. Like, when the renovations were nearing its crucial phase, the guy in charge asked about my preferences regarding electric outlets placement. I thought about it and proposed some configuration. Then he asked where I was going to place TV. And it didn't even occur to me. Yes, TV, how could I forget? I wonder what's TV, in a sense, it's not really a source of information, it's more like a comfort device in the framework of the conventional lifestyle filled with oxytocin, potted flowers, and a schedule of normal life events. But there are no five-hour walks from work, which would be something abnormal within this set, but I'd miss them.
Well, I digress, the sunrise...