Cigarette between two fingers in the darkness no longer enveloped in humidity that had bathed the city for the past three months. The invisible smoke felt only by the nose and barely by the eyes. The orange sky polluted by the city's energy shrouds the weak blue fading into the horizon. When he pulls the air through that invisible roll of broken dried leaves, his small world likes up a bit by the faint flint at its end.
The shouting had ended behind him, where the living room now stands silent, divided from him by the patio doors. For a moment he can hear the humming of this mega city. For a moment, he discerns a sudden scream of a taxi usually drowned out by his preoccupations and their endless shouting matches. For a moment, the sound of a truck's gear break on the big avenue behind the role of brownstones reminds him that he is in this sea of people with no knowledge or interest in the strife he feels is tiring him out every day. As he inhales another breath through those crumbled leaves packed in a factory far away, he hears a distant plane flying over. He looks up and see some blinking light moving across the dark, orange sky.
His thoughts return to the weight he feels is getting heavier on his shoulders. Then suddenly, they fly off like a horde of pigeons startled by a menacing, aimless child, when a horn blows in the distance. That sounded like the horn a ship blows when backing out of a harbor. Is it so strange that he now realizes he lives close to the sea. It would take him half an hour to walk to the sea but somehow, all these years he had lived he, he at some point has forgotten that he is close to the sea. He smells the invisible smoke in the darkness, and tries to imagine the smell of the sea, tries to imagine the vastness of the ocean into which this boat that had just blew the horn would be entering. He tries to imagine the world that is larger than this city, which is already infinitely larger than his world of bickering and egos and self-pity.
He closes his eyes after the the distant boat makes another bellow. He doesn't know anything about navigation or boats, besides how to step onto one and getting off it. But he imagines being somewhere else, far from the living room behind him, even farther from the cigarette smoke he is smelling now. Another truck accelerates and then putters again with its engine brakes. Another plane passes over, leaving a wake of mechanical noise. The sky seems to get only more orange while also darker. Yet, his thoughts take flight into the distant ocean where the cold, salty waves give comfort by dissolving his thoughts and giving them volume.
