Chained to the World

All the colors have been washed from the world, a world filled with ignorance and spite...to reach the place where we need to be we may need that lift from above....but you always must be careful what you wish for

I peered through the darkness filled with inner-city smog. Sirens wailing in the distance, it seemed as though they were a constant alarm reminding us of what the world had become, of what we had let it become. Dark, dank, and unforgiving. No matter who you were, what you were, you could find somewhere in the world where you would be spit upon. For our face, your tone, your body. How long ago had humanity stopped being humane?
Now the thoughts or feelings of one�s neighbor equaled that of a wasp that had caught an unlucky wind and was now splat across your windshield. When did the world go dark and even the passage of time seem to be useless to keep track of? How old was I and how long had I been staring into the city that I always knew was there? Minutes? Years? Centuries? Where did the colors go that long ago made us laugh in the happiness that now seemed abandoned? Now the world seemed dissolved in pools of black, grey� Sometimes fading into no color at all and disappearing into empty atmosphere. It was the blandness of it all and yet the hate. How those two even began to run together, I had no idea, but in this world they did. While the faces, like the colors faded in with each other you could still feel the fierceness radiating from each; scorching you with eyes, tongues, and minds alike. Forcing you to go into yourself and block out the world that had become so distant from everything, including itself.
Is that why I never knew? Never knew I stepped away from the window? Never knew that I left my home in the heavily heated city and never knew about my journey? When did it begin? Where for that matter? How did I come to this strange, amazing land? Where the hills appeared out of the flatness that had always shown.
I look up into the face of a giant, rough and ragged with age; frightening to behold yet something within the face strangely familiar. I knew it so well and yet the name seemed foreign on my tongue. From a dream, words that were once lost forever came flooding back as though Pandora had once again opened her box. For the first time� was it the first? The sky� the word rolled off my tongue in a warm remembrance at a great reunion. Blue. Soon I was being led by a force I no longer controlled, and yet I made no attempt to struggle or stop it. I had no wish to.
I made my way up the giant�s face, stumbling while trying to get from the eye�s ridges to the brow; finally getting to the top. I�m still not sure how long I climbed. Days? Years? Centuries? All I knew now was that the sky was within my reach.
I stretched to the forms suspended in air searching my new found knowledge for the word� the name. Clouds, and how I longed to grab hold of them. To let them lift me into the light nothingness I yearned for.
Nothingness that at the time of being so crisp and straight could catch you in softness and in a loving caress. It faded into itself, almost as if in a comparison with the darkness of the city, swamp hole I had left, now lost in my past, trying to be shaken from my mind. The indents of the past taken foot steps had been blown away, no way to trace back to me; I was free from the echoes I had left in the valley, but not from the world that held the valley, itself.
As though my wish had been whispered to the clouds themselves I found myself grabbing hold of them. My fingers did not slip through them, like through shifting sands but were able to be tangled in the soft folds, able to have a strong hold. Muscles tightened as arms stretched and strained, trying to insure that I would be given the proper leverage to be lifted into the sky.
But it wasn�t right, wasn�t what I had pictured. I was not becoming part of the sky that I had grown to love in the few short moments of reunion. No, I was anchoring the cloud down, back down to the earth I had thought to escape from. This wasn�t the dream; the dream that moments ago had seemed like reality. And� and this wasn�t the fate of this cloud. To be dragged from Olympus onto the human life. Waiting, locked up, in a chest, in a corner, in the selfish mind of city, worldly life until it had become mere wisps of what it was once before. This was the punishment that human kind had bestowed upon itself; it was up for us to carry the burden we had locked and chained. Fingers trembling, I let go of my dream. Perhaps I would continue on the journey to which there was no destination. My life had become the destination, but there were no directions, no road map. I had touched my dream and for now that was enough.