City of Lights
The sun has gone down. Around you the world is still alive with brilliant light; a spectrum of colours streaming from towering buildings, only a fraction of their iron skeleton
visible through the thick blanket of grimy smog. The shower of light illuminates every corner and crevice, lining the night sky with the bright, flashing beams of artificial lights.
The rainbows captivate you, each building desperately trying to outshine the next. A fierce, incessant battle that stops only when the sun shows its face, coming back to life
once again as the sun leaves for the night, never letting the darkness within the city walls.
Thousands of tongues of dark smoke escape lit cigarettes, twining through the sea of people, only to be swallowed; extinguished. You inhale the chemicals that slowly
poison you. You ignore the abundances of screaming children, complaining elders, and the chorus of a foreign language, which drown out the heavy traffic.
Shouts of unintelligible words come from sellers, beggars singing off-key in a ceaseless cry for help, a constant fight for attention: recognition of some sort. The familiar aroma
of eccentric food and the welcome sizzle as they hit the scorching metal and deflate have become home. The puff of that smoke carries the last whiffs away with it in the
gentle breeze.
Walking, you want to see anything but the mass of black, you want to feel anything other than the sweltering heat of a stranger’s body pressed up too close to your own, but
that’s what you get. (You should really be used to it by now).
The occasional gust of wind does nothing for the agonising humidity, much less the sweltering heat that drenches every man, woman, and child in a sheen of glistening
sweat. Beads of moisture cling to their clothes, pasting their ebony hair to their foreheads. Below you is only a carpet of black: heads pressed up so close together you only
catch gl