4/26/2019 1 Comment City of a Hopeless DreamTwo days and no sleep, she had stolen away in the night like a fugitive, running not from the law but from a place she had been calling home, from people who loved her, from arms that had held her. There had been so many arms in that city, so many souls that she had latched onto, that had latched onto her. They wouldn’t let go, they couldn’t, for what she gave them was nothing short of magic. Eight hours, the worst ride of her life but finally she was here, she was gone. Sitting now in a rooftop apartment, all windows and no furniture, watching cranes pull metal from the earth.
So many had lusted for those hands that could hardly hold her own broken pieces together. They wanted her smell, her lips, they wanted the grand ideas of her that they had built up in their heads, and she felt very much like a white whale, simply trying to swim while captain Ahab and his crew craved ownership. But what is a whale to do? So confined to the sea, helplessly swimming the same route year after year—they knew where to find her, they knew she’d eventually succumb to their spell. She fell victim to her own heart, love dripped from her lips with every sultry smile and smirk, every giggle, every spin. She loved to spin, she loved to feel gravity disappear as her eyes closed and her feet danced. She was always falling in love, sometimes with a person, sometimes just a moment, or a feeling, or a place. She felt no love for that little northern town anymore, no nostalgia at her parting, she was running from those ghosts of the love that she had spread so carelessly, so full of hope. And now with eyes heavy, after a day of feeling like someone else in a place she had never been, she finally felt free. The beginning was today, in that moment, with Julia making dinner in the kitchen and G talking her ear off about a job down south they could both get. She knew she could stay here forever, she knew she could leave tomorrow, it didn’t matter. It would never matter.
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AuthorAvery Atlas is the author of all posted pieces. Archives
January 2021
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