This London image was unfolding in front of him oddly not embracing any human behavior. No cars or people walking around, no sounds, no movement; absolute stillness. The arrangement laid ahead was suggesting a movie set, forgotten by people but not time.
It was an icy sunny morning on his way to work, sitting on the train departing from Waterloo heading towards Portsmouth Harbor. Passing by along the Southbank, the sun’s almost tangible rays were reflecting on the city’s glass buildings. The sky was crystal clear with a soft baby blue color that was easy and pleasing to the eye. The space was totally illuminated with no chance for an object to escape from the radius of this immaculate radiance. Shadows were absent and darkness could not be comprehended as a word within the context of this image. He witnessed this scenery many times before; first time three years ago and frequently for the last month. Autumn had surprisingly been very nice this year; cold but sunny and bright. He was sitting with his back facing the West. His positioning, the direction of the train, the human artifacts along with the miracle of Mother Nature was offering this “almost” fulfilling revelation; “Almost” fulfilling as he was hard to please. He did not consider his strict judgment as a quality but rather as a negative aspect of his persona. His ego loved it but his spirit hated it.
He thought he knew beauty better than anyone and appreciated pleasure without naivety. Somehow, within his brain complexity, real everlasting beauty was distinctively connected with potent emotions; and being in contact with your emotions was something that many people were lacking in his opinion. Obviously the only beauty he understood was the images, concepts, subjects, objects, actions he chose to consider beautiful so for someone to convince him that something else was beautiful or true would require a lot of effort which not many would be willing to invest in. That was another perception running in his head; truthfulness concludes to beauty, purity. He wished that he had a miraculous filter that would only let truthful people and truthful situations pass through and leave all the crap behind. This way his life would have been full of beauty and no crap at all; simple as that. “What a load of bollocks” he thought and he laughed to himself and returned to the grounds for a second. That did not last for long though. The sight he was facing was too intriguing.
The wide double-glazed window stood as a barrier in front of him, not letting his longing sensations become reality. This was not a problem for a great illusionist as he was. He could flee away from his body whenever he wanted; he could make his body sense things; he could even give himself goose bumps. The enormous powers of mind allowed him to envisage at a higher plane than one normally does. He always liked taking it a step further to improve the visuals, to improve the sounds, to improve the whole experience in every single possible way. Becoming one with what he was seeing would have been the ultimate contentment.
Extravagancy was not something he considered to be elegant but it was something he enjoyed experiencing in order to explore limitations. Testing his and other people’s limits was his own little game that was keeping him entertained throughout life. He was fascinated by the possibilities. However, in real life, the old Greek saying “πάν μέτρον άριστον” (all in good measure) was constantly jerking his brain not letting him get carried away with superfluous and worthless demonstrations of subjective beauty.
The urge to escape was suffocating him like a python wrapped firmly around his collar, blocking his blood circulation and puffing up his veins. He placed both hands on the cool surface of the window and gave it a gentle, but rather dynamic push. Two steamy marks were left on it as it got detached from the rubber frame that was holding it and the window floated away in the void. Gravity disappeared. He found himself wandering out in the open leaving the train behind him. Although the train appeared to be in motion, it wasn’t going anywhere. It was trapped in a time frame like software that crashes on a PC repeating the same useless function within a millisecond; an infinite loop. Its rattling sound was fading away in the distance until it finally died completely but with the train staying in its original position, as when he first flew out of it. The chilly air burned his lungs in every breath he took, firing an internal clout originating from his chest, lifting him up higher and pushing him closer in between the glass-wall buildings. His clothes started dissolving into small strings of fabric giving him tingles while they ferried off his soft skin and disappeared behind him as he shifted steadily through space. The heavy shoes on his feet, able to escape the luck of gravity, melted like heated plastic and gradually was scattered on earth in chunks of black dense drops. He was fully exposed, liberated. He didn’t know where to stop; he wanted more.
Instantly the light breeze came to a halt and chilliness settled on every angle of his stripped body; in between his fingers, in between his toes, at the back of his knees, at the back of his elbow, in between his crotch; he could even feel it in between the trails of his wrinkled parts, everywhere. Each pore on his tender skin got aroused, making him feel ecstatically alive. Absolute body awareness.
The coldness began to turn into a burning sensation as he ascended closer and closer to the buildings. The glass walls were operating as magnifying glasses that redirected and intensified the sunlight which hit him like a heavy flash. The nearer he got to them the more he could feel the sun-rays being injected to the surface of his skin as spiky pine leaves. Little holes gradually getting bigger, shaping into little craters started originating all over his body. The rays were burning through his flesh and eventually reaching his bones. His deeper insides were on fire; they were reaching temperatures as high as the ones of magma. The burning sensation had now turned into a wave of energy that was running from his lower limbs to his torso, up his chest along his upper limbs and all the way up to the very tiptop of his skull. He felt he was being pulled from several directions as this energy was fighting to escape his body. His deeper insides wanted to escape. Thick drops of blood emerged from his lower eyelids and like pearls slide down his rosy cheeks on to the ground breaking and covering the dream with splashed redness.
He was receiving more than he could take and he didn’t know how control it. Suddenly everything started moving in fast forward mode. People and cars appeared in the streets, familiar city sounds were buzzing in his ears, the train behind him jumped out the time frame that it was stuck in and once again everything seemed to have been moving on. The movie set was alive and busy. It was just him now stuck in a time frame, receiving and receiving, without knowing when it would stop. The body could take this no longer.
The icy air was burning him externally while the sunbeams were burning him internally. Black crust of burned skin cells surfaced due to different levels of extreme temperatures skirmishing against his troubled body. He was reaching the end and he knew it. He could stop it if he wanted to, but he chose to fool himself, pretend he did not know how to. He thought “Let me get tricked once. I will not let me get tricked twice”. He exploded into a billion fragments of condensed dust that dissolved slowly in the air. The dream went red, then pink then light pink until it turned to white and then just light.
He opened his eyes, had a bite from the cold almond croissant that he bought earlier from the station and carefully sipped some black Americano which was hot as hell. He smiled as he thought that once again he managed to entertain himself out of nothing. The prompt image was left behind as the train was exiting the city getting into the boring and melancholic suburbs of London. He didn’t care though. He had Sylvia Plath in his backpack to take him into her world, where darkness is not an option but an unfortunate circumstance. That would keep his mind busy and away from self-destructive thoughts during his journey.
“What comes after Sylvia Plath?” he wondered.
- Rhododáktylos Ēō’s – “Rosy-fingered dawn.”
This phrase occurs frequently in the Homeric poems referring to Eos, the Titanic goddess of the dawn. Eos with “rosy fingers” opened the gates of heaven so that Helios could ride his chariot across the sky every day.
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