UNNOTICED, I brush against countless arms, like everyone’s fleeting youth colliding with the impending yuletide.
The gossip interferes with the sound of bass guitars, and heavy thumps of drums become nuisances to the tenderness of everyone’s voice. I attempt to bump shoulders with everyone for a closer look, to see and feel. Crowds morph into havens of my significance. Whatever I am, I will sink into the warmth of everyone’s torsos.
But eyes would land everywhere else, except mine, necks turned upward to the colorful explosives in the sky.
What have I missed these past years?
I am surfing through the crowds with ease. With every pass certainly comes a cool breeze. Life returns.
Life has long been gone, forced underneath grounds and stuck between intruding halls. It has long been cold for those underneath, with only your high school rumors breathing life into what has passed.
Photos and back camera flashes oversaturate the quiet structures around; flash photography reveals stories hidden among the dark vastness of deserted corners.
But I have found you all. For a brief moment, it is warm again— the blurry line of the uncanny halfway blending into the undead.
Like clockwork, more of your friends tap into the blurred lines of the unseen. And I am simply basking in your obliviousness of what lurks among the star-shaped lights, of what might come back for you in the dark halls of a random school night. F
