Perspective on the End of the World

Emi looked forward to the apocalypse.

 

The sounds coming up from the street below distinctly did not herald said apocalypse.

 

That was always the problem for Emi: no apocalypse. Too many noises, too many cars, too many people. And none of them had any interest or inclination to stop and be silent for even a minute, to examine the world as it was, or as it could be.

 

The "artist loft" she rented had a stunning view of the city. The vista was perfect for art and inspiration, the real estate agent had told her. It quickly turned out that the only artists who could work with that sort of vista were photographers. It was prime real estate for someone who could frame an existing image and capture it, but it turned out to be worthless to her, as Emi couldn't manage to focus or concentrate on an original creation with all the bloody cars feeding through the city's asphalt arteries.

 

Still, the space had been too good to turn down. There was nothing that a few do-it-yourself modifications couldn't solve. Emi hung blackout curtains, and it worked for a while, as she was able to put brush to canvas a few times. But the effort to hide the view of the un-still life that crawled through the city, from delivery trucks to delivery boys, and from angry pedestrians to the angry drivers who almost hit them, was a failed one.

 

Out of sight, Emi discovered, was only out of mind if you couldn't hear any of them, either. The curses, taxi hails, horns, and engines that were the city's heartbeat made it through the loft windows, morning and night. A heartbeat doesn't stop until the body dies, after all.

 

There was no apartment tall enough in the city to escape that sort of noise. Not one she could afford, anyway.

 

Artists tend to starve when they produce no work, and Emi had become hungry enough to begin eating her brushes, end first. She stalked back and forth through the loft, jaw clenching and unclenching, bouncing the brush in the irregular rhythm of a person lost in thought. Her whole body was tense, clenching and unclenching her entire being, top to bottom, in mental exercise to generate something on the blanks canvas in front of her. Emi's bare toes clenched and unclenched in syncopated counterpoint to her jaw, even though she didn't realize it, trying to ground herself in synthetic carpet that only drew her further out of sorts.

 

Anyone who has lived in one knows, loft is ancient Greek for rentable closet or one-bedroom bedroom, and it left Emi feeling claustrophobic and irritable. The huge, white canvas, which held the wide-open possibility of infinite creations upon it only served to put deeper bite marks into one of her favorite brushes. Emi couldn't tell what time it was, but she could hear the traffic jam at street level, the city's blood clotting around a single intersection, as every part of the body seemed to scream, with that scream being the dissonant bleat of every car's horn at once; the sound of a heart monitor that warned the city was getting ready to die.

 

The city wouldn't die. Traffic cops with whistles would be dispatched, and lights would turn green, and things would quiet down to their normal whooshing blood flow that is the sound of tires on pavement. The apocalypse wouldn't come, and the patient wouldn't die, and Emi could not breathe.

 

Forcing herself bodily and mentally from her rentable closet, Emi rushed herself down the hallway, and into the building's stairwell. Up. Out. Air. Space. Open. Outside. The roof door slammed open, lighter than it looked, as she shoved past it into sudden blindness, as a wall of painful white light greeted her eyes.

 

The roof's concrete was cool under the soles of her bare feet, and the air was enough to bring chills across her bare legs. The sunshine that had blinded her was now providing enough warmth to take off the edge of the chill without burning the skin. Blinking away the blindness and squinting to keep from being blinded again, Emi saw the city in a new way. She closed her eyes one more time to take in the sensation of the cool breeze over the top of the building, that pulled on the layers of her unbuttoned shirt flapping around the teal cotton one that was enough to keep her warm against the wind, and let her feel refreshed without being cold.

 

It was in that deep breath of freedom under an open sky that Emi decided she didn't have to wait for the apocalypse anymore. She was going to make it.

 

Emi's excitement didn't flag over the three trips it took to manhandle her stuff up to the roof of the building. Manhandling a canvas only slightly taller than she was up the stairwells was the biggest challenge, but she didn't even notice that, as her paints tray and easel collapsed enough to make the race to Armageddon easier than expected. No one could have been more eager for the end of world.

 

Looking out over the city from her building's rooftop, Emi could no longer see the blood clots. She could no longer hear the dissonant heart monitor's horns. She looked out over the cityscape, and saw only the tops of the buildings, like tips of bones sticking up from a shallow grave. She saw the patient dead and buried, and she saw the world ended. Then, she saw the world begin again.

 

Sunshine and altitude don't bring death, but inspire life, and Emi felt that as she finally was able to put brush to canvas. Whipping her strokes in a manic and liberated frenzy, she laid the foundation of a new world upon the old. The detail work came soon after, in vibrant, living colors, as she dissolved the clots and transfused old blood for new into the city: a living green replacing the red of steel and rust took hold of the streets and the skyscrapers, as Emi got to liberate herself from the claustrophobia of the city, and the city from its death.

 

She had laid out the city with a new life, and realized she'd done the same for herself.

 

Emi looked past the apocalypse.

 

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Author's Note

PHOTO CREDIT: Wenqing Yan (yuumei) - DeviantArt
PHOTO CONTENT: "Re-Imagine" (http://yuumei.deviantart.com/art/Re-Imagine-381363630)

1,055 words.

ABOUT THE PROJECT:
Every piece was written before I knew who or what the image was about. Credit and attribution was revealed only after completing the story for each picture.

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