one hundred lights
Autor: Eduardo Peixoto | Publicado: 2011-09-20T22:57:00-03:00

<!--StartFragment-->  The night was humid and cold, however the intensity of the winter was now gone, and the wind hit with less roughness when on the bare skin. And that, as an announcement, was a prefix for the rapid springtime, which would dilute itself on the fluidness of the crazed summer. While trembling through the city streets he was unsure if he was longing for it or his mind was bound to freeze in the winter. With the cigarette still hanging unlit on his hands, he was fast-walking in the direction of nowhere – nowhere not due to the lack of direction, but due to this growing uneasiness which was resulting in a heavily disturbed personal state. He could taste the red wine on his mouth already, however it wasn’t permitted for him to drink a sip of it for the next days – and his mind was set to skip that on the following afternoon. As he watched the street bums trying to arrange a dry shelter for their pipes to rest on, he finally lit the cigarette, and he sat in an uncovered bunch, moist, and paid some attention to the smoke lifting up to the sky. He thought about how much brilliance risen from such moments – moments of vagueness, moments where ideas came from, watching the cigarette smoke as it filled the area in front of it, and how much those moments contributed to society enrichment. The artists, the scientists, the industrials. But the structure needed in order to brighten his brain and lead to that state of mind still longed some maturity, and that reflected on the nature of the wasteland which hanged his wits. The rain came again, and he ran, unworriedly, uncaring, not fast enough to stay reasonably dry, and there he ran to the closest covered bus stop. There wasn’t many people walking around in that particular night along those downtown streets – a weekday, and already past commerce working time – and the bus stop was empty. He thought about how much loneliness did those urban streets resonated at night - even though constantly bloated by many and many people whose life lines complemented each other without any particular interference, in this incredible state of harmony which couldn’t exist anywhere else except inside the intricate (and, some may call, the obscure) organism of the city. And, whether it didn’t resemble much heat from distance, the diversity applied into its mechanics make up for a hell of a passionate and lively pulse. And, as he wandered through those thoughts which weren’t exactly arguments, but rather the trail to a mind who was boiling with excitement and urgency, as he curiously wandered throughout his own in-formation ideological pathway he thought to himself that there could be nowhere else to live but inside of one of the big devices which constituted all of that built around him. Though having some unfinished business, his psyche wasn’t particularly focused on them, and he felt light and nice. Confused he was sure he was – but at least he was sure of something. He smiled to himself and lit another cigarette, as the other fell down while he ran, and he did his usual observation. He could hear the usual sounds on the urban nightlife; the screaming, the police cars sirens going north, the cars always running by, the possible echoing of some random slaughtering somewhere... That urban fluidness gave him a proper ground, gave him a sense of movement and gave the time some needed worth. And those weren’t mere sensations – they were personal traces which belonged to them, in the sense that that was his true home. While some consider that to be a source for stress and wrath, he felt rather embraced by all that amazing human labor, the skeleton and the foundations of its work. Whereas he didn’t perceived this every time, he was always feeling it, and, as he got out of the bus and lit his first cigarette in the primer minutes past sunrise, as the noise and the straightened faces hit them first thing in the morning, as he did those repetitive daily matters, he brought to his mind some inspiration. The general idea of the mechanical nature of those deeds are completely false – how could it be mechanical while entangled in such a vibrant and diverse background that the city life represents? The invented idea of the ideal daily life was a complete dystopian and false scenario – and he knew that with the conviction that he generally had in his ideological root. The lights of a metropolitan bus coming his way blurred his eyes and prevented him from extending that thought – but he let it ran without stopping it, he wasn’t craving to go back home. He knew that, while back there, he would again fight with his mind, so he decided to take another walk, as the rain showed herself thinner. As the night fell through, the movement felt shortened, allowing the lights of the streets to risen its importance. Amidst the ecstasy of his thrill, however, he could smell something wasn’t right about all of that. He couldn’t exactly figure out what it was – maybe he lacked the books, the age, whatever reason – but he felt firm about the comprehension. The machinery was working, but it might was struggling to work with in its full power. Maybe it was one of those lampposts without any light in it.   <!--EndFragment-->