ー asterbucks cafe

@▪ kronos [] is this an open starter?

The sky is a dome of eigengrey, like a mixture of present and future. Present being the morning. Future being the chamber. Everything beyond this point is an abstract painting, with too many spewed curses and bloodied knuckles but it starts like this: at dawn, the promised hour ticks closer, millimeter by millimeter; an hourglass with a choked neck. He takes in another lungful of carcinogen, and prevents another fistful of thoughts. The aubade sings in the sigh of rainwater, under his hood, he counts the seconds, counts the ripples too. Say, the crepuscular lights form the ending of serenades, and incrementally, the sky withers from rotten to fresh-colored. Now the instance had him on the upper end of the spectrum, bright sunlight hours looming across the horizon, where the breeze paints cheeks red like the sweep of watercolour across pressed cotton, the streets as its canvas. As slowly as the creeping dawn, pigment bleeds through the city in a vibrant tempest, and the minuet changes key with a liberal crescendo. Where the sunset is dancing watercolour, the sunrise is an amalgamation of oil paints, roiling and thick and slow to settle. He’s a witness, but before that comes the night where lamp posts flicker underneath a deserted road collared with the mauling silence. The ellipses eventually cover this series in coastal skin, bracing the weight of the submersion by dragging his entire body outside. After all, the muscles are nothing without the propping bones, and the propping bones are nothing without the pillars of the mind. In summation, the thoughts move the wheels of his cogs, and he finds himself under the fall drizzles. Wind nips at skin through the tessellated threads that can no longer protect from the chill. Autumn is officially here with its nipping wind and chapped lips, mouthing his name with its downpour that begin as soon as he walks away from the sheltering roof. He draws his hood, pocketing his hands. With that expanse, came nostalgia, and he imbibed it by pints.

In this realm, Kronos plunges through to the oversaturated road, indulging in the quiet that remains with the rhythm of his footfalls, a thud thud thudding in a shelter from the reprehensive stares of the monochrome, a refuge where Olympus’ wounds encompass galaxies, its teeth specs of silver, clusters of the diaphanous he will thread the next day for the runaway Selene.

Crosswise roads bleached into attrited paths, ruined and unseen to any keen eye.

Hinted against the sutures of his seams: the absence of direction is the destination.

Globed shoulders push the door open, and he’s greeted by the proliferating jazz melody that has proven itself to be perpetual—creeping, consuming, vivid like a new born, gnaws at the veins under his skin; a background music in a café that no one actually listened to, volume a baseline far below the audience chatter. But he listened to it intently, trying to dissect the sound from the clattering implements, wrapping his fist around the melodies in search of a reality grip. (It was risible how, at the end of the night, the great escape was found in bandaged knuckles around a paper cup.)

He takes a sip, two.

He knows how the day will end, by proxy. It is like a habit, like a ritual.