1.
This is a summer story. For how would our bodies know to move through the Metropole without seasons? Wake up, my little flâneur, for summer in the city waits for no one, and wastes for nothing. It's iced latte season outside in the Coffeecore Extended Universe, but indoors you're permitted everything, poured out in tiny porcelain cups. What does it matter now, that the world is balmy? Radiate your heat freely. It needs no conservation.
You see yourself reflected in the blush-tinted mirror above your pink sheets, your boudoir strewn with pillows, as you would have it no other way. You put a crown of baby's breath in your hair, the little white buds coming out of the tentative melancholy of cold spring, the sprigs against the length of your inadvisable and newly shorn bangs, the ones that met with the kitchen scissors once at 3 AM. You flash your teeth at yourself confidently, in the know. If the shoulder pads are imaginary, they are all the bigger for it. Come on, princeling of the sidestreets, up and at 'em!
2.
You're good at being blue, but today's coming up roses. Your office is across a plaza with an artificial lake, set with fountains. They thrum hotly against the sky, itself so thick with dew it could almost be raining. When the air conditioned lobby doors open with a whoosh like the taking off of a plane, you feel ascendant. The elevators chime in the alphabets of your happiness. The is so much that you can do this way, sparkling and filled with love. You are both an effect and an affect.
It is not so much that you have abandoned melancholy, but that, with the change of seasons and a shift of humoural lines, it displaces itself temporarily and you're new, all done up in plastic packaging, sealed on the shelf. It is not just the season, that makes this possible, of course, but of all the arcadias in all the universes, this one is yours, and you make the plinking sound of the fountains resonate even past the tempered glass windows of the boardrooms and mezzanines.
3.
You might have been lovers before you were even born in this world, but when you sink into the plush green chairs the colour of sparking something, of amorous imagination, of new bamboo shoots, you know that this world is one in which there is also possibility. The mezzanine is the floor of the possible, in all of the possible worlds, of which this is but one of many, this city and its crossings. The energy of wanting strikes the blinds just like the sun, glancing inward. It is as gentle as a sketch and as certain as a diagram. You could sit here until evening falls, just watching the play of the light.
You don't, of course, but you could, which is the heart of the matter. Time passes here, in particular, like syrup.
4.
You count the moths drawn to the streetlamp in the muggy darkness. They, like, you, circle the city in finite and yet somehow inscrutable pathways, etched in. Somewhere deep underground, like the bonsai and the swimming pools and perhaps even the contour of the tectonic plates, you know these decisions are made, dice are cast, lots are drawn, and this is the result of the lucky dip lottery. You are lucky today too, as you watch the petals fall languidly off a clipped rose. Loves me, loves me not. Light, darkness. 1, 0, 1, 01.
Are all decisions made this way? Are they all even decisions? There is a lottery, they say, amongst the Babylonians...
The lights hum quietly, each individually the note of a pseudo-randomly selected piano concerto by Chopin or Debussy. If you timed you walk correctly, you might hear it there, on the wires of the night.
5.
At night you have tea instead of coffee, for that is not a law here, despite the name, and it would be boring, were it sacrosanct. Tea leaves are supposed to tell fortunes, but your tea is clear as a bell, as a waterfall, as a pristine river. It doesn't taste clear, though. You like your tea smoky, say a lapsang souchong, because it is in impurities of smoke that you find the most delight in hybridity. Someone you cherished once told you that a love without impurities is baseless, that were it not for the flecks of chance in the brew, neither eros nor philos would be a worthy matter. The Platonists of the city disapprove, but who are you to mind the Platonists? They can dwell amongst the forms, for you do not care; for you have chosen the city in all its irregularities.
When you enter the flower shop, you are surprised by the gloss black of the interior, by the recessed dome in the ceiling painted to look like the sky. There is the language of flowers-- various roses for love, white chrysanthemums for truth, red camellias for perishing in grace. 鷺草 Sagisō, is the white egret flower. You are told that it means "my thoughts will follow you into your dreams". You buy them, just a few blossoms of the velveteen orchid, wrapped in heavy brown paper between your hands, tied with kitchen string.
At night you toss and turn. It is sticky and you kick off all the sheets. In the morning once again, staring into the blush-tinted mirror, you might catch a glimpse then, ever so briefly, of the dream, the falling petals, the die landing on its facets; the face of your contrapposto lover.
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