reading room
Trying Not to Disappear
Quartz in the windowsill. Lantern in the rain. Velocity hidden inside the murmur of trains.
Cinnamon drifting through gravity-heavy rooms. A loose thread pulling an avalanche from somebody's chest.
The harbour looked liminal that evening — cactus shadows flickering across marble walls, every detour glowing briefly inside the spectrum of dusk.
I carried a hollow compass wrapped in velvet, its rust-coloured circuit still humming softly like meadow remembering an echo.
Vinegar skies above the glacier. a paradox held carefully beside a chipped teacup. Beyond the horizon the smell of sandalwood and the whistle of distant factories.
Every fragment felt nebular. Porcelain hands reading through static and wildfire, through magnolia gardens and pendulum clocks.
We wandered the labyrinth collecting trinkets: a daydream folded into a ripple, a cobweb suspended above an inkwell crescent, thunder trapped in mosaic glass.
The jigsaw never finished. An ember turning slowly inside a carousel of origami birds. Semaphore lights blinking down abandoned laneways during the tempest.
Somewhere, a biscuit softening in tea. A dandelion surviving beside a satellite dish. Crystal accordion music floating through petrichor evenings where fireflies gathered around old chalkboards.
Your suitcase remained unopened inside the cathedral hallway. Raindrops trembling against saffron windows. A mirage inside a telescope. Walnut tables wet with drizzle.
The typewriter kept speaking in blueprint syntax. Candlesticks throwing echoes onto the fountain walls while the zeppelin drifted silently through clockwork shadow.
Near the lighthouse the riverbed glittered with feather-light monsoon water. Starlight caught inside a paperclip on the cobblestones.
A harpsichord somewhere upstairs. Snowfall against the turntable hiss. Corridors filling slowly with waterfall sound. An hourglass tasting faintly of peppermint.
Then: balloons against silhouettes, copper vines around the vineyard gate, children on trampolines chasing moths through parachute-coloured lanes.
And afterwards, only moonlight. A hummingbird suspended inside silk-dry air. Smoke rising softly from the chimney like the word itself trying not to disappear.
— Lilith