In Defense of Useless Skills
On an unscheduled walk home over the Brooklyn Bridge, I was caught unprepared in a downpour. One of those raw, mid-february rains that left you bitter, tasting nature's indifference to your existence. But maybe I should have just packed a fucking raincoat.
Stranded, some eight or nine miles from home. I can't recall if I had even bothered to check a bus schedule before I left. But it was New Year's eve, and it snowed that night. So as the year lapsed, I wandered out into the drifts and the driving white storm. On my way through the curiously still wilderness. Did those last hours remember to pass by out there? Or were we forgotten out in the expanse, when the last whispers of warmth succumbed to the stillness. And I shuddered before that void, and every extinguishing gust that swept through me. And I wept, and howled, alone with the wind. The bus ride would have taken 30 minutes
The sun was lost, faded out beyond a distant ridge. Lowered into that darkness, that unbroken blackness, I blundered and darted to string up my shelter to hold back the encroaching cold. Upon that peak I had cast myself, before me the frost that followed the receding rays, then went the shadow, then the absolute abyss as it swallowed the slope, tracing behind me the path of its phase. From the reach of the ridge, down the one thousand feet to the floor of the valley below, all was filled by the void, then some form taking flight, I had sensed, aloft in the wind. Torn from from its ties, unhinged it plunged down, and I too was consumed by the unrelenting night.