002: Dull.
Hey all. I wanted to take a moment to say, yes, I realize I’m drastically overestimating how much people remember this little project of mine, but that I want to recommit to it, and that I’m sorry I’ve let it linger. It’s been a very chaotic and often upsetting past few weeks, hence my silence. I did want to post something, though. Maybe just as a way to get feedback, or at least to put another meager cry out into the drone of the apathetic noise of the world. This is an older piece, but it’s one I’m genuinely proud of, and I hope you’ll enjoy it.
Dull.
That’s what people associate with streetlight. Not the kind of streetlight from the modern cyberpunk-lite hundred-foot-tall metal obelisks of piercing white light, but of “streetlight.” The warm pale hum of the bulbs incandescing tiny amounts of mental, using little aberrations of physics to transform the atomically miraculous into the pedestrian.
The hum of every one of those sixty hertz fill the hot city air, because we all know these lights are dotted around cities. Bulbs hang off the sides of buildings and out the tops of splintered wooden poles, spitting light down onto the streets. Each photon seems to thicken the air exponentially around it, and swirls around with the rest of the newborn urban night; sagging power lines, cars speeding in the distance, a symphonic arrangement of insects sing into the sky, and they all mix with that dull light.
I catch myself walking under these lights often. They bring something to life that I’ve never managed to find elsewhere, as if the light itself is agar, nourishing a sample of some exotic life form. Maybe it’s some kind of American twilight, found only in the suburbs, the places where the skies are vast, yet so strikingly shallow. Glimmering skyscrapers fall off the horizon and their lights choke out the stars. Or, I suppose, the dull streetlight does that, too.
And for all its romance, the yellow streetlight is a siren song, leading the mundane charge of the anodyne unto the rest of the land. These roads could be out through the sticks, past all the rumblings of rubber on roadways and choked by the dust kicked up by old trucks, leading the way to the places time didn’t just forget, but ignored. I must admit that I never know where I find these lights; the alleyways they illuminate all lead into one another. Lights of airplanes blinking overhead never seem to change their positions in the sky. Cars seem to pass by faster and faster, and the sidewalk is running out.
I wish I knew what it was that led me to these non-places, these concrete and asphalt-lined bottles of time and space, sitting on a dusty shelf somewhere in my memory. Maybe the magic is in their timelessness. They’re landscapes and moments so ephemeral, so undesirable, that they pass without a trace. The real life goes on on the opposite sides of the broken garage doors, rusted fences, and tinted windows of the passing cars. Families come together over a dinner table, only to fall apart when their plates are all made up and their drinks are poured. A mother blasts her car’s horn, clearing her way to the hospital for her daughter’s labor. When he hears it, the widower’s truck grinds to a halt; his wife made cookies for that family, that girl in the OR, when they moved to the neighborhood, although who can say when that was these days.
Yes, people never really stop and take in this sight, the fullness of the light’s breath and the muted cacophony of the residue of everyday dramas that all play out on stages far more suited for their narratives. Maybe it’s there, in the fact that the dull yellow streetlight is forgotten, passed through, utilized, maligned, and discarded in the name of progress, that it opens itself up to someone like me. A hopelessly romantic wanderer, confusing the glass tubes of plasm for the interstellar spheres of plasma, walking the never-ending streets in the city of pale gold light, trying to find the soul as lost as mine.
Then, maybe we can dance slowly under the streetlights, and we, too, can unmoor ourselves from the forceful grasp of time. The notes of the music of the everywhere nowhere can free us from our heavy feet — the feet that always seemed to know to take us here — and we can slowly, achingly slowly, radiate our every cell. The fact of our bond made real as our atoms glow by way of the photons, and we finally become the dull yellow streetlight.
This was inspired, in part, by the track “Amar pelos dois” by Salvador Sobral, best known as the winner of the 2017 Eurovision Song Contest for Sobral’s home country of Portugal.