Concrete, with extract of sky

[squirmelia]

She plays snap with her eyelids, a burst of chalky sky gnawing at her glances. Like lightning freed from a valley, the sun has fizzled out. Rosehips creep around the torn-up foreground, the background possessed by crumbling towers of concrete, humming the clouds away.

Her hyper-curled lashes animated, she dreams about her cheeks sampling the sun when the sky reclaims the distant melodies siphoned by the building. The building will be ruined entirely, deconstructed. She will be mesmerised by the vastness of the landscape and will gaze upon nothing but gentle wisps of fractured clouds.

The day after the concrete is extracted from the sky, she returns, ensnaring herself with tangled vines on the ground, holding her down, as if she fears she will float away. She clings to the moss, the pebbles, the sparse patches of grass, her pupils enlarged. She imagines the abandoned contents of the building - twists of webs left by spiders, curled-up woodlice, scraps of torn down wallpaper and then she is plagued by tumbling fragments of bittersweet tales of everyday ennui.

She crawls towards the rubble, serenaded and searching, with a shifted tantalisation. It is then that she sees the reflections of the sky mutated in the remains, as if the concrete had extracted a particular essence when it fell, and sky and building had merged.

Years later, she has drifted far from those concrete towers, and is working underground, amongst painted words and grains of flour. She sees the sky crackling on the concrete that surrounds her, and realizes the repair, her view luridly swollen without obstruction or haze.

Comments

[gentio.livejournal.com]

Have you ever read any John Paul Sartre? I'm reading nauseau at the moment and a number of times i've come up to really descriptive passages that remind me of your writing style.. and i've been meaning to ask you for a while now..

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

I am quite fond of Sartre, although I tend to like his fiction much more than his books that contain only philosophy and do not have much of a fictional element to them (I've never got to the end of Being and Nothingness, I have to admit).

I think Ivich from The Age of Reason was one of the reasons I wanted to learn Russian. :)

[gentio.livejournal.com]

:) This is my first Sartre book but it's fictional ( with of course heavy existential philosophy undertones ) but i'm really enjoying it so far. It's the kind of book that you really have to be in the right frame of mind to read as every word or so means something, rather than being able to skim through it all.. so you recommend the age or reason next?

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

I found Anny in it quite amusing and wondered if I get too much like that at times, trying to create the perfect scene. (At least, I think that might be why I still have not gone on the London Eye!)

The Age of Reason is part of a trilogy. I can't remember which of the trilogy is the one I like the best - will have a look when I get home.

[huylen.livejournal.com]

i like your writing alot

what do you do? or study?

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Thanks.

I am an integration engineer. Software mainly. What about you?

[huylen.livejournal.com]

i study cultural history 1800-now
and i have an internship as a webeditor at vpro at the moment
a dutch, public, 'alternative', radio/tv channel
this won't last
i hope to have my ba in july
then i go travelling

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Sounds cool. Where are you travelling to?

I was planning to travel in September, but from March, I am probably starting a new job (related to e-science), so I'm going to have to put off my travel plans for a while. I guess it gives me more time to save and figure out where exactly in Mongolia to go. :)

[solitarywalker.livejournal.com]

Concrete and sky have very different smells.

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

Sometimes the air smells of cement, but the sky itself, beyond just the immediate air, what does it smell of?

[solitarywalker.livejournal.com]

Pure, clean, crisp... not dusty like cement...

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

I'd like to try to categorize many different smells into those two categories - smells like the sky, or smells like concrete. I'd probably get the guy from Perfume by Suskind to make me some kind of meter that would be able to tell, because I doubt my sense of smell is good enough for that. I wonder if I smell more like the sky or more like concrete. Hmm.