The city takes its first breath about an hour before dawn. The birds still sleep and all the alleyway denizens, the insomniacs, the shuffling lost wanderers, and the empty eyed heathens returning from dreams of corrosion and pain - some key piece of clothing always missing and forgotten - are lost to the world of sound. Jordyn stands at the window and the silence is a perfect garment for his thin body in the cool glow from the lamps outside. I roll over to watch him watch the street, seeing my own dim reflection in the glass of the sliding door before him that’s open just a crack for air. What a breathtaking creature he was then. Like an elegant and fascinating bug with a lean musculature that belied a whispering strength. It was a mundane miracle of paralyzing normality that he didn’t transform in that moment into a glorious insect and fly away. His lean brown shoulders cracking open to become gauzy wings of iridescent orange and milky white. There would be a complex and sublime geometry to the pattern of the wings, something that only nature gives us when they want us to choke for air in astonishment at what they can do, how many more dimensions of subtlety and magic they possess. And as the first young bird breaks the silence of the morning and reanimates the city Jordyn would disappear. The architecture of his wings would carry him further and faster than my desire to make him stay had the power to prevent. | image @shannonhemmett . . . . #writing #fiction #memory #art #artistsoninstagram #amwriting #vancouver #blackandred #eastvan #eastvancouver #arttherapy #shannonhemmett #actors #painting #writersofinstagram #writer #remix #thechemicalspray #buster #yvr #music #theoughts