The Anatomy Of Melancholy

The sky purple and deep above the fast black surface. In the half light before dawn all the violet and the rare shadows reveal colors we cannot name, something beyond cobalt and viridian and umber. The dew wet pavement streaks the streetlamp light in silvery cold with dapples of thick heavy dewdrops and my body relishes the splash of the cool damp air. The heat of the previous day forgotten…

The big road running to my left looks like India ink, the asphalt which shimmers with the heat wave during the day is now a mirror of reflections of car windows and headlights and the pale glow of street lights of sodium gas lamps soak into my eyes….

I can hear the cars traveling on the road, the hollow rush of the tires and engines and the quick dull thump as the tires roll over the steel joints of the span of the nearby bridge.

Something in me loves a bridge like I love dreams in which I’m flying. The suspension, the rise coinciding with the falling away of the ground, the feeling of traveling over water.

Something in me fears a bridge like I hate dreams in which I’m flying. The pinprick feeling at the nape of my neck of no solid ground, the notion I might jump and fall, the ending of the dream.

As the night’s curtain parted for dawn I could see the blue and the branches, tall slumbering trees, sap thickened and slowed by the night cold. Things of the night withdrew like the tide as the sky lifted and lightened ushering in a brand new day…..