She Left Me Roses By The Stairs

Warmth, sunlight on the water, happiness curling inside like a full snake settling for a nap in the warmth of a lamp. The clouds have parted to allow the sun through, I have been in the best company of my best friend for a day and a night.

Sleepover like we haven't done in years, sharing a bed more comfortably than I'd expected, but only because I had forgotten that our days of awkwardness are long (forgotten) gone. Memories of a younger us make us laugh now, how naive we were, how silly and ridiculous.

Boys on the ferry babbling about boy things, just as ridiculous as us when we were younger and occasionally even now. Sometimes we are still silly, in our way as we grow and learn.

Together, anything can be accomplished that we set our minds to.

Her name is Emily, my best friend, and I love her like family, like life, like sunlight. We will be old, crotchety women one day together, all silliness still silliness and all memory.

Some friendships fade away. Some are just made to last for ever and always.

Structure
Building
Brick building
Post Office

The old red brick post office at the end of the road

Structure
Building
Statue
The Statue of Liberty

Lady Liberty, standing tall and proud; a gift on our shores.

Remember the city, the way it once was. Remember the lights you would use to find your way home in the rapidly cooling desert night. Remember the love in the air, the feeling of belonging. A city of strangers, all of them here for similar reasons. Every single one of you becomes the city, creates the city, lives in the city, and when you all leave it is as though the city never was. All the remains is dust and wind and the feeling of that love soaked into the ground.

Piecemeal, the city grows one person at a time, one beautiful stranger after another.

Dance, there, in the pounding music in the desert night. Surrounded by the city that truly never sleeps, allow yourself to be lulled to dreams on the distant sound of revelry and awake as the morning becomes too warm. Step out into the softness of morning, the heat of daytime sun, the drowsy daylight company. Pass by strangers and friends alike in a haze, in a daze of wonder at all that came before and all that is yet to come.

Remember your dreams of the desert. Remember the city of dreams in the desert.

Remember to go home again.

There is no such thing as a true silence, except within sensory deprivation. There is always some sound, even if it is so commonplace in the background that we now consider it to be among the silence.

The humming of a refrigerator in the middle of the night, the breath of a sleeping lover, the creaks and pops of a settling house, the crackle and snap of a water heater clicking on to heat the water for your morning shower. These all comprise a sort of mundane silence.

The quiet of an early morning (or a very late night) before the sun is even beginning to peek over the horizon, walking in the silence of a sleeping city. The far-off hum of those few cars at such an hour, the barely-audible buzz of streetlamps and a passing neon sign.

These are all the best kinds of not-quite silences, to me.