Twilight Time

We’re just in time.
• By all appearances.

Feels dreamlike up here—like resting on a couch when Autumn sneaks in with a chill, and someone is there to throw a blanket over my shoulders.
• So you don’t have to surface, so you can hold onto and return to your dream.

And I can see, right through my closed eyelids that they’re also lowering the light in the room.
• But gradually, using the dimmer switch. And they don’t turn it off completely.

They know I want just a bit of that light left, to hit the edges of the buildings in my dream.
• Or else the shadows would disappear.

And those are very important characters, keepers of secrets, shades.
• All hail amber Luna—she begins to rise.

I was a detective, on the trail of something—a film noir type thing. As usual none of the telephones worked. They never do. Or else there would be ways out of the situations and I’d probably wake up.
There was much pursuit. From and toward, but not sure what. I kept doing stupid things that set me back. Dreams are like movies and yelling at the characters to point out the obvious which they’re missing doesn’t work.
Movies and dreams need those oversights to keep the story going forward. In movies the writers create the action missteps. In dreams I’d have to yell at myself since it’s my creation. Is there a co-writer I can blame? I’ve never met him.
In what they call real life things might be different—the shadows might actually correspond to the shapes of the backlit objects. Not so here. I was on a mission and, as usual, overcoming endless obstacles seemed the overiding theme. The solution was always just ahead.
The sun had just set. I stepped outside on a city rooftop with a friend. Sirens howled below. It was suddenly chilly and she pulled out a wool afghan from her backpack and threw it over my shoulders. It was twilight time—the last bit of light hitting the buildings edges. A vast full yellow chalk moon was emerging on the horizon. Somewhere a bell chimed. Time to wake?

Oh my god it’s going to fill the whole damn sky. Impossible!
• Always seems that way. But that’s why we’re up here — the awe and the goosebumps.

It’s that weird spookiness that happens on any crystal clear night I face the endless above.
• The sense that gravity might just falter and we’ll fall up into it.

Right now light and sound seem to be made of the same substance—I can almost hear the sound of shadows brushing along the walls.
• Those beams of streaming light through windows at Grand Central Station—I once heard them whispering.

Beautiful spot from which to view our vast kingdom—the building walls turning from brick to dark brown.
• And watch that celestial khaki boulder shrink to a small white pebble right before our very eyes.

The pleasure of illusions.
• Amen.

© AleXander Hirka 2020. All Rights Reserved.

Read RemingtonWrite’s version here:

In August 2020, I set myself the challenge of creating a daily digital collage based on an image and a concept. The image was that of the antique Omega watch that belonged to my Mom and the concept was Time.
In September 2020, the Anomalous Duo is challenging themselves to write a short piece of fiction for each collage — the Our Hours project.