I waited and watched. It was a few minutes after dusk, and the skies had already turned a deep shade of indigo, all pretence of blue and orange and pink shed quickly after the sun's departure from the heavens. The green of trees was gone from the world, as the green of trees had always gone from the world for centuries before the moment I knew would come soon.
Bough and bark was bathed in a strange darkness that was not merely the absence of light; it was a darkness of and by itself, a monster that spawned other terrors in the minds of those who knew fear and other doubts in the minds of those who knew loneliness. It consumed everything, even my home from where I looked. I was out of matches, or I knew could've scared the monster away, chased it into the corner whence it had come, no longer to pour out from my past as the echoes of my youth.
I looked at my watch again, making sure I was on time and wouldn't miss the awakening. The lamppost, the pillar of metal that had my unwavering attention, was a few hundred paces away from me, straight ahead, its crown lost in the thick foliage of a banyan planted by the side of the road. Cars passed by beneath the tree, their eyes shining light into the black blanket that buffeted their forms, they pushed through with an industrial groan into the future that awaited their arrival.
It was either war or hatred they drove into, but it was a future of some sort nonetheless, and when cars and other wheeled things went into the future, they went into the future with hope. A hope that things would be different, or a hope that they would make them different. One way or another, the cars passed by, momentarily caught in my present where I would consider them thus and then let them slip out through the corner of my eye.
All this while, I was only seeing ahead, I wasn't looking, I wasn't watching. But now, I watched because I could see a dull amber glow come on amongst the banyan's leaves, and there was light suddenly as it blossomed steadily to become white, whiter, and soon, the blackness around it was gone. The monster was gone from my world, and the dark green of the leaves became discernible from even this distance, even though they possessed the penalty of thieving from the brilliance of man and were tinged with dirty orange.
No matter, though: let there be light, said man, and there was light. God, I knew, would have been taken aback at that moment because man had usurped him, brought in a darkness upon himself that only he could save himself from, and the need for godliness was no more. He was his own anti-particle, a bringer of light and in its shadow, a vast darkness, a creator and destroyer of worlds and worlds—trapped between the two layers of a consciousness that was turning in on itself.
Further down the road, there was a bridge, a flyover, and it was painted entirely blue. Like the lamppost, it reminded of something else other than itself, a representation that so far away from the real so as to be entirely different, a nature removed by Sputnik as much as to be art. The construction reminded of a sea I had seen somewhere, either beyond the shores near my home one night or on a television scream, a sea of orange and pink and blue and yellow and cyan and black like the contents of a lava lamp spewed on a sheet of Alamogordo glass, its bomb-hewn surface gently breathing radiation.
Tens of lampposts flanked its long, serpentine body, and even though some of its scales peeled away with a nostalgic redolence, I thought it was absolutely beautiful. Maybe because I also thought it was human, the way it breathed, the way it swallowed, digested and spat out, the way it stood still between the past and the future, basking in the glory of its creator that was also man.
My environment was not of divinity's making but of its defiance’s, a new formless world ridden with confusion and scepticism, full of windows that opened into walls and doors that opened onto the ceiling, but still filled with people trying to fix things. A mound of clay that was still slightly wet even after the child's hands had massaged it into an ugly lump.
There was hope, a hope that the day bridges would be taken for granted, the day lampposts would be turned off to make way for an equalizing darkness, the day I would walk amongst the tress and the forest's animals and birds and not find the raging wheeled in my presence, man would regret what would have befallen him by then, a world bereft of his intelligence and a world of surrender.
There was hope that the day man learned of his antithetical character to divinity and the destructive deck waiting to be dealt between his five fingers, man would also learn he could chase god away from his kingdom and fashion in the beast's place a throne for himself. There was hope that man would sit upon that throne.
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