Mornin’ soup

The air was frigid

Like soup left on the table

The wind blew in forceful gusts

As if blind the to long dead heat

 The night was a hungry child

Hummingbird

I sit on the roof. It is a cap roof, if a wind should blow with gusto at a certain angle my house would be decapitated. Get it? I sit here dangling my bare feet whilst the sunrise emerge like a growing splot of spilled tea soaking into my grandmother’s Colgate-white table cloth, but in fact it was black in the beginning of things. In a multitude of pinks, lavenders and sly bright oranges, the colours bleed across the skyway.

I smell morning smells. Felt morning feelings. Saw morning sights. I stay awake to feel the world shake the night like a favourite fuzzy blanket, reluctantly. I think of how recently I was taken by the urge to chop off half of my below-the-waist chestnut hair. I can’t say why for I don’t know yet. I made my mother do just that a few nights ago. She did so, also, reluctantly. Another thing, I have taken to wear my post-braces retainer again. My gran frequently reminds me of what a waste two years of self indulged pain was. I finally decided to put the damned thing on, freaking aesthetic compulsions.

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After Dark by Haruki Murakami

via Goodreads.com

Rated: 5/5 stars

Eyes mark the shape of the city.

– page 3, 11:56 PM

Have you ever felt that a certain book could have been written just for you? After Dark is mine. Possessive, I know, that’s how it feels but then since when has a book never been personal? It’s a quiet and observant work of art, one that just states it purpose in an understated inflection that belies its significance, its message to us.

This is my first Haruki Murakami and I have fallen in love. I’ve tried so much, struggled to express into words the soft-but-firm clinging strings of the spell that the night has cast upon me. So far, I haven’t found a short version, After Dark is the long one, and it’s come close.

Commuter trains of many colours move in all directions, transporting people from place to place. Each of those under transport is a human being with a different face and mind, and at the same time each is a nameless part of the collective entity. Each is simultaneously a part of a self-contained whole and a mere part. Handling this dualism of theirs skillfully and advantageously, they perform their morning rituals with deftness and precision: brushing teeth, shaving, tying neckties, applying lipstick.
– page 241, 6:50 AM

This fact of being an individual entity and a part of an ever morphing jigsaw puzzle of existence simultaneously, has always been on the fringes of my awareness and reading this it fills me with some contentment, now that I’ve finally seen it put in a coherent arrangement of words.

Mari has made her way through the long hours of darkness, traded many words with the night people she encountered there, and come back to where she belongs.
– page 243, 6:52 AM