Night bled into morning and went unnoticed amid the orange glow that spread through the sky above the city, lights on streets and in windows burning and leaking into the
clouds to reflect back and drown the sunrise. The city was never quiet, but here it was quieter; fewer cars, the calls and shouts from the street seeming muffled by the time
they reached the rooftops where we sat. A cigarette burned orange-red and left purple trails on the vision as it travelled, briefly casting it's owner's face in an infernal light as they sucked on it's innards to poison their own. Bottles sang their own soft dawn chorus as a foot tapped against them and a cork popped to mark the beginning of another half-hour's drinking. The last few nights had been too hot to sleep and by now we weren't even trying; content to just sit up here, catching what breeze we could while the city burned in it's own artificial dawn.
"I'm leaving, you know"
It's a statement that poses its own question, a reaction sought, but nobody gives one and whoever said it stays quiet. We're all leaving soon, have been for years and one day maybe we will. Talking about it seems wrong, accusatory, hollow. A laugh from the street below filters up, louder than the other voices and harsh in the still air of a dying summer night. The traffic is already picking up and if you look really hard, you can see the dawn light in the east, reflecting off the lake at the edge of the city, where the chemical refineries sit and never stop, lit up like cities of their own. A helicopter goes overhead, its spotlight strangely off in the darkness; the light comes on later, in one of the suburbs, and we can hear it buzzing overhead, along with the sirens that drift over on the breeze.
"I'm leaving, you know"
Everyone is asleep now and its just me talking to the bottles and the buildings and the ashtray with it's burning cigarette that I've decided I don't want. Something we've all talked about but never done and now it's time to make good on a promise that I never consciously made. The last Polaroid in the camera is jammed in my door by way of explanation, and my bag feels emptier than I remember as I walk down the stairs and out into morning.
The city is old. Seems a strange thing to say, all cities are old and this one is too; the first skyscraper was built here almost a century ago, rising out of the buildings that made up the city before that. All cities are old but this one is older; buildings have stood by this lake and people have lived here for centuries. It was here before the last war, before the one before that and as each has crumbled and fallen to ruin more people have come and rebuilt. People forget but the city remembers, and it tells me its stories and its secrets; tells me in my dreams at night and in the soft songs of the wind as it blows between the skyscrapers in the dark air and the neon glow. In the day the city is noisy and busy and at night the noise and the movement turns to a different kind, and in the darkness the past is a part of the present and the long-forgotten dead move through the streets and the city whispers into my ear.
The lake is the key, it has never changed, never been developed or used like the bays and rivers and lakes of other cities. It's something to do with the water, and nobody has ever been able to find out exactly what, but the fact remains. People blamed the military base on the far shore before the wars came and went and the base was long gone, where the refineries now stand. Sometimes people blame the refineries too, but the lake has always been that way and nobody has ever known why things don't float right or get eaten away, or why the water is always so black and cold.