How to leave your noise, your smog, your triple parked heaps of junk? How to break up with the city in which we climbed the highest tower, boarded wooden ships, dreaming up some fatal fever? The ruins under the streets are still there, you know, still ignored, lit up conspicuously by construction lights, sending hard shadows to the walls and into me. I try to swallow them and spit them out onto the busy city streets.
I am looking at the Arch, comparing old photos and memories. The Roman citizens’ faces are all but eroded, glancing at indifferent passerbys, looking back from ancient space and deep time, searching for a way to hold on to who they once were, to eternal feelings that span the ages, love and longing, love of life, cast in stone, forever.
Until they crumble to be swallowed by Terra, undercut and made into ornamented bricks by squatters, their own ignorant kin. This is where it ends, the push, the draw, the blinding lights through broken clouds fade out. I wrap myself again in your blanket of black and yellow noise, of smog and quadruple parked cars. I dream of snow-capped Mount Olymp in the distance and your face appearing among the Romans. Abject, almost eroded, cast into deep time, but looking back at me forever.