Assignment #2 - Description

This week's assignment was to evoke the feeling of a place, and a moment within that place, through wholly descriptive language. Narrative was to be avoided as much as possible. I found this assignment extremely challenging, and have some trepidation about posting it here, but I did promise it, so here it is.

Enjoy?

Home

It feels as though both the city and I have been sleeping while I was away, but as my feet step from the bus onto sunwarmed pavement, the city wakes and I wake with it. The doors hiss shut behind me and I am home, in all its grit and glory.

The city wakes, and stretches towards the sun with towering skyscrapers that cast no shadow; they catch the light and make a game of tossing it back and forth between them until finally it falls in shards to the sidewalk below. The downtown streets collect broken light that clings to chrome and windshields until the cars throw it off to shatter anew against walls of warm brick and smooth stone, of hard glass and cold steel. Cracks and crevices gather the light into tiny pools, welcoming it and creating a sense of space at odds with hundreds of right angles that struggle to capture and enclose. It overflows, stings at my eyes, and I turn.

The city wakes, and yawning wind assails me with choking dust and the cloying scent of hot tar on conrete, and I must learn to breathe again. Corners are everywhere, sharpening the gusts into blades. It has not rained here today, and the city thirsts. Its parched air sucks greedily at my skin, which tightens until it has become too small for me and I am certain it must crack. I can feel the sun digging into it, seizing me roughly as a parent would a child gone too long before easing its embrace and burnishing me with molten gold. Heat rushes down and through me to pool languidly at my feet. The city’s floor sends it back in waves, at once buffeting and bolstering me as I pause to regain my bearings.

The city wakes, and its lifeblood begins to flow, people streaming by in twos and threes jostling me gently aside. Snatches of conversations held in a plethora of languages surround each cluster, an intangible wall to be penetrated only by those who share the secret of tongues. On the corner across the street, here in the city’s heart, an old man begs for loose change. His face is weathered and sunbeaten, his beard scraggly and unkempt; he wears layers of dirt interspersed with old flannel, reeking of humanity. His fragrance blends with the dust and the perfumes of inner-city traffic, with the softening tar and the ever-present miasma of coffee, tickling at the edge of perception as the city wakes, and whispers to me once more: I am home.