Born again
It's new year's eve, coming up to the countdown.
I sit, in a roofed outcrop, by the mouth of Dublin Bay. There's a glitter of lights from the Wharf across the black water.
Beside me, a girl is perched on the Bay wall. I can just make out her hair blowing in the soft breeze, the rest of her lost to the blue-black night.
"There," I say, to the girl, and the boy behind us somewhere. "The clouds."
They stand out against the absence of sky, eerily pale. They are the brightest thing out here tonight.
I see them again, from the balcony, just after the year turns. There are fireworks breaking along the cityline. I have a sparkler in my hand, mimicking their showering brilliance. I am hypnotised by the way the white-hot sparks are swallowed by the darkness, dead almost as soon as they are born.
"You have to write your name in the air," someone says from beside me. An Australian, I think.
I do. When I close my eyes I can see it written there, a fiery line behind my eyelids.
We spend the first few hours of the new year travelling. We are in one car, with a girl dressed in a white gauzy skirt and white butterflies in her hair, her eyes unfathomable. Then a different car, to meet a boy on a bicycle, beside an empty blankwindowed school. He has ridden across the city, another traveller in time.
A candlelit basement. An overpass. A fairylit hotel lobby. This city - this life - it's ours for tonight. We are invincible.
Some time before dawn breaks, the girl and I are in bed together. In a few hours I will get up, go travelling again, extending this night that falls between worlds. Later still, we will walk out onto Dun Laoighre pier, the girl and I, into the first evening of the new year, singing songs into the whipping wind with the taste of the sea in our mouths.
But for now, we are still. We whisper, though there is no-one to hear us.
Outside her window, the world is being born again.
I sit, in a roofed outcrop, by the mouth of Dublin Bay. There's a glitter of lights from the Wharf across the black water.
Beside me, a girl is perched on the Bay wall. I can just make out her hair blowing in the soft breeze, the rest of her lost to the blue-black night.
"There," I say, to the girl, and the boy behind us somewhere. "The clouds."
They stand out against the absence of sky, eerily pale. They are the brightest thing out here tonight.
I see them again, from the balcony, just after the year turns. There are fireworks breaking along the cityline. I have a sparkler in my hand, mimicking their showering brilliance. I am hypnotised by the way the white-hot sparks are swallowed by the darkness, dead almost as soon as they are born.
"You have to write your name in the air," someone says from beside me. An Australian, I think.
I do. When I close my eyes I can see it written there, a fiery line behind my eyelids.
We spend the first few hours of the new year travelling. We are in one car, with a girl dressed in a white gauzy skirt and white butterflies in her hair, her eyes unfathomable. Then a different car, to meet a boy on a bicycle, beside an empty blankwindowed school. He has ridden across the city, another traveller in time.
A candlelit basement. An overpass. A fairylit hotel lobby. This city - this life - it's ours for tonight. We are invincible.
Some time before dawn breaks, the girl and I are in bed together. In a few hours I will get up, go travelling again, extending this night that falls between worlds. Later still, we will walk out onto Dun Laoighre pier, the girl and I, into the first evening of the new year, singing songs into the whipping wind with the taste of the sea in our mouths.
But for now, we are still. We whisper, though there is no-one to hear us.
Outside her window, the world is being born again.
posted by Riona at
3:01 PM
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