Bright Nights

As the clock strikes 8:30 pm on a windy night in San Fran, people, strangers, enter and exit the hotel lobby. Accents from near and far mingle every now and then as whispers tickle your ears. It's an empty Victorian style lounge, the type that you know you don't belong in, and that you were never meant to feel natural in. I type in those last emails for my day of work, which has yet to end at this time, knowing that the next day will begin bright and early, beginning just as the skyline melts into the dark night.

An elephant trumpets quietly in its corner at entering guests, its frame forever frozen in a ferocious affront to passersby. Its kind of like how the screams in your head never quiet, never stop yelling at all those incidences taking place left and right, silenced by an unconscious knowledge that it may be useless. The glimmer of hope that tells me that this is not so cannot stop your repeated entreaties to just let it out.

You'll be punished, I say, unfairly, unjustly, uncommonly angrily by the masses that don't consent to your ways. Ways that are violent in the most fundamental way, battling against your soundless war against not only eternal souls, but the essence of the properties that enable us to functionas private independent beings, not so liberated in the end.

And so I sit back and watch the reflection of the wind blowing the leaves, swaying frigidly in the Western winds. And sit back to enjoy a little reading that will allow the screaming to momentarily howl through the words that I absorb. To release the seething anger that I know cannot be unleashed in full force. And my throat burns with a sudden thirst that cannot be quenched by water...