brigdh

It's beautiful tonight.

I thought it was raining, at first, when I opened the door. Every streetlight and lamp and lightened window was caught in a net of sparkling haze, and things looked farther away then they should have, curtained by mist. It wasn't, though it must have been earlier, because the streets were still wet and puddles deep enough to be mirrors dotted the sidewalks and the air was soft and damp and curved in close. It's so bright that I could read a newspaper outside; I can hardly believe it's almost midnight. But of course it is, because it looked nothing like sunlight- it's the wrong color and it makes the wrong shadows and it comes from every direction. The sky is low and pale, lavender and orange and almost white to the south, toward downtown. The colors are unbelievable. If you saw it in a movie, you'd think it was special effects, but it's real, if temporary. It's lovely in the true meaning of the word: it makes you love it. Buildings faded away near the tops, and the white steam that billows out of the generator vanished only a few feet above the brick smokestacks. I could see my breath faintly, but it didn't feel cold. It's nearly silent, and the distant rumble of construction equipment was audible; the bus that swept by me sounded too loud. The river was black, black, like liquid shadow, and I wanted to stand on the bridge forever and watch the yellow and white lights dance on it, shivering and shifting and never moving, the silver Vs that streamed out behind a dull orange buoy, the half-drowned grasses and tree roots at the very edge, constantly pulled south by the flowing water.

I wanted to wake everyone up and shout look at it, look at it! Every day is like this, as wonderful as this, but sometimes when I see it, it's like waking up, or discovering something amazing and new and precious, and it's so beautiful that it makes my chest ache. And it's Always. Like. This. How can you not love it all, want it to last forever? How can you ever, ever get tired of life?