The Leaving

I stood outside and thought about it, then I thought some more. Once again, I had found myself high up, continually climbing, ludicrously skyward, the 23rd floor to be exact. The scene before me was drenched in orange from the setting sun and I watched this liquid orb as it melted into the horizon. I bid it farewell like a lover, disproportionately sad, that, it too, was leaving me, though, of course, it was me who was doing the leaving. This ‘who leaves who’ business is anything but an exact science; it’s not exactly cut and dried.

The buildings below did their best to hold onto the last rays of this beautiful orange light and, at the precise moment that this golden skin fell away, I felt their sadness. Loss can be a tricky thing, leaving small compartments in your heart forever empty, as it does, like the now darkened windows in the buildings below.

Just then, the breeze turned. Or was it, perhaps, replaced by another? so different in character, somehow sinister and uncaring, now that the nurturing glow of the evening sun had completely faded. I became aware of the sound of the traffic below, suddenly obtrusive in this new grey vacuum. I too had shed my golden skin, like withdrawing from a warm bath in mid-winter, leaving me exposed, careful in my movements, premeditated, as though playing a part, I’m a simulacrum of normalcy. But I am practiced at this, smoothing the jagged edges from the surface as a trowel on wet concrete, below which, lie the skeletons of the years, chilled to their bones.