Not the echo but the sound itself. Streets know our steps, twin beats to the same rhythm.
They're just the backdrop to this solo act. Twilight syncs with the mood; everything's mellow, everything's still.
You lace up, step out—pavement's a stage now. Above, neon gods hawk silicon dreams; their glow bleeds into twilight. No need to dodge shards anymore, the ground's clean—but the sky? It’s a market, and every star's for sale.
Between the sheen of pink and orange luminescence, each man shuffled through the tunnel as if on the cusp of falling into an iridescent trance. Who’s leading, who's following? The concept of hierarchy disintegrated here; they were disciples and heretics, all at once, to the creed of an ocean locked behind a glass screen.
Eclipsed by the seam of yellow that lacerated the world into dualities—green here, blue there—the quintet stood. Not human, not object, but some disquieting amalgamation where the boundaries bled into metaphoric murmurs. Their dresses, flamboyant apostrophes in a sentence still searching for its subject, screamed without sound. Below them, a glassy surface as if made from the tears of Narcissus himself: reflecting, duplicating, but never quite capturing the essence.
Under the blinding embrace of an orange sun, they marched. These congregants in formal attire—each suit and gown an embodiment of social conformity—yet visually estranged by azure squares that enveloped their faces. Forget facial expressions; these were pixelated voids, the occluded portals to souls now subsumed into geometric abstraction. Occasionally, one would sport a blue circle on the body, as if tagged by an unseen hand wielding a cosmic stamp of approval or, perhaps, disdain.
The city skyline ahead, backlit by an indeterminate source, loomed like a two-dimensional cutout from a pop-up book, beckoning yet aloof. Between that crystalline future and this luminescent tunnel, there floated a sense of temporal dislocation. Was the walker moving toward an actual urban haven or merely approaching a painted backdrop—a façade at the end of the world?
Bodies studded the shoreline like antique relics of some future past—or was it future present? Intricate designs inked on their skins whispered tales of rebellion and compliance, rites of passage and acts of defiance, in glyphs that evoked ancient physicists and quantum mariners alike. Their nearly bare forms were both canvas and manifesto, and they wore their scarcity of garments as if they were the epitome of a new-old couture, one that mocked the boundaries of time and propriety.
Used to be you keep your eyes on the ground to dodge glass shard. These days, you look up and there's some hologram trying to sell you the future.
With the change in your pocket, bodega guy knew you. After hours cee-lo and street fighter at the back of the video store too. Now it's all tap cards and forgotten faces.
