A city girl's take on chaos.

dear friend,

there could never be enough metaphors for our cities — we are sweet children of afternoons where there is more smoke than sky and evenings where there is more wind than air, sweet children of lessons in breathing, in rolling up the windows when the smoke gets too black, bringing them down when an orchestra of night plays across streets and the Sun trusts us with our streetlights so it sinks in relief behind neighborhoods made out of clay

friend, we will always understand when we are eighteen and the pages of our books tell us that some people believe that chaos breeds in order and it’s not a bad thing, that when mismatched skins and non-polar voices brush against each other, there are sounds that we can make poems out of.

so we will always know we can melt into mess, descend into anarchy within our ribcages, wage war against our silence, and that while we break we will give way to rivers of broken faith, we will give way to light and the six’o’clock grace of the breeze, and howl so that the universe will never be the same again, because it shook in places where we went and broke our fingernails, knees, bones, and hearts.

friend, don’t you see that our cities might well be the universe’s snark at the human proclivity to set things in order, to set things straight, to dress up and head there, and get here and have that so when rain accidentally trips over our streets, we are flooded, and when some things strike, we have no cover, and that the paint is always scraping and that the walls of my favourite places aren’t tremor-proof.

friend, we are sweet children of cities that never learnt to place reason above love, that never learnt how not to malfunction in places where it matters most — friend, we are sweet children of chaos, spewing infinity from our mouths in places we break, in places where we couldn’t have reached to kiss if they hadn’t broken.

friend, when we fall face first into our destinies, we collide with language to produce the world how it has never been before --

and this is my collision.

this is my love song.