By Leighton Tanaka, TIWP Student

Have you seen the speckled windows of the coming storm? 

Have you felt the Earth quiver before the quake?

Have you heard the sky whisper before it collides?

Like a bright ball of blue under the burning sun, what are colors if not lies?

In my town, some streets fit together like a puzzle, the sidewalks are perfectly clean, and the foliage is perfectly green. Things are perfectly safe and people are perfectly absent, not in the sense that they are gone but in the sense that they are alone. The houses are old and weary, their vibrancy has left them behind long ago. Most of them have peeling paint, splintering fences, stained walls, and faulty doorbells. Yet some remain the same as if the world has not touched them in years. Most assume that they were abandoned by their owners, then sold and transformed into oil wells or electrical substations.

I will leave my house today. 

My house groans with each step taken as if it can deny the memory of the sun. The wind whistles past my ears, my clothes are plastered to my body. The rain glistens like hundreds of tiny jewels, it floats down to the ground before being whisked away by the gusts. It creates music as it thrums on the decaying roof of the house. 

In the distance, a tall, windowless building sways in the wind. It was not built like a typical skyscraper with a tapering figure but was instead constructed with blow-through floors so that those living in its shadow would only experience bars of sunlight filtering in through the crevices. At night the moon is practically nonexistent, coating the city in its ghostly radiance. 

I stand just outside the door of my former home, being taken by the battered wind. The streetlights give off a bittersweet glow. The highways hum with the symphonies of our destruction, the sky has no light. The moon is running away, the stars have burnt out, the clouds hang low over the hills, devouring them with the unforgiving sight of the blind.

And yet here I stand. And what am I but a stain on their crisp white paper?

What am I but a nobody seeking an end to a foolishly charming life? A nobody seeking the divine, the aperture, the hallowed lands on which we fall.

I may be a nobody, but inside me, I hold the brilliance of a life cut short. Like a graceful fawn standing tall on its slender legs amongst the wind carrying with it the flurries of the apathetic planet before being hunted for velvet, I too stand tall until my fated end.

A willow in the wind, a bird under the dawn, I await my destiny, whether it be life or death.
I take the first step.