The lights in the windows stare at the blurring contours. The whole environment holds its breath. It freezes under the gaze of something that has silently slipped uninvited into its perimeter, like a hungry, nocturnal predator waiting quietly for the tension to force its prey to make a mistake. My hands are covered with goosebumps and I begin to tremble in the waning orange glow of the last day of August. Soon I will go to sleep and the world will stop burning. Nothing will change - at least not on the surface. For me, however, the smell of the air will carry with it an uneasiness, permeating my body like a shiver of longing for the sun.
I go for one last walk before entering a new reality, wanting to feel the touch of the world before the unspeakable transformation, before its tissues are torn apart by a mysterious force seeping into the intricately woven, rich fabric of entangled lives each year after crossing the magical, arbitrary line on the calendar. The force of muscles carries me to meet something that appears periodically, never emerging from the shadowy corners in which it hides. The weaves of limbs penetrate into basements, into sewers, into the interiors of buses crowded with students, and the wind carries the first tentative notes of the smell of decay. An unnamable presence wakes up on the same day every year.
Midnight strikes. I hear a low murmur vibrating in the concrete structures and rumbling between the walls surrounding the empty streets. No one rushes to escape. The few lights in the windows go out. The murmuring grows, ripples, arranged in rhythmic fragments. The creature speaks to me in a language I don't understand. I pick up its voice with my whole body; I accept it like an unwanted gift. I wander with my eyes over the rough surface of the urban horizon. My ribs tremble, harmonizing with the sound that cuts into the space between them and shakes my heart like an icy fist. Its tone doesn't fit into any scale known to humans, slipping between microtonal spaces. It thrusts, forcing attention, from directions inaccessible to the human ear. The creature's flesh moves at the periphery of sight. Having learned by experience, I do not try to look for it. I just want to stand for a while in the first September chill, watching the remnants of August's enchanted warmth escape from my body.
I am not the only one who feels the presence of a mysterious being. It appears in carefully spoken words, overheard snippets of conversation, whispers on the bus, the bustle of bars. It creeps in everywhere - its massive body splitting into millions of small gestures. The entire web of mutual understanding burns in its presence, and words become pregnant with loneliness and helplessness in the face of an intruder who cannot be named. Like birds tugging at the bars of a cage in a futile attempt to escape, people wrench their words from under the crushing weight of a solitude creeping in from nowhere in response to a lingering fear with no clear object. The first terror turns into an exhausted, helpless isolation when words fail and the body still feels the threat, though nothing ever happens. The being appears and after a while disappears, only to reappear at the same time the next fading summer. The change it brings is like an invisible crack in the wall of a container with a toxic substance.
Time passes, untangling the knots of matter. Decomposition accelerates - the arrival of the being sets in motion a sequence of digestive processes. We slowly disappear inside a huge stomach - too big to even point at the esophagus, which chokes us as the movements of powerful muscles squeeze our inert bodies through it. The world sheds its old skin. The mill of intertwined tissues tears the skin apart; it makes it crack with its coldness. Its shriveled remnants rustle underfoot as we walk along the leaf-strewn sidewalk to reach as quickly as possible wherever warmth will chase away the chill of the crushing end. From the direction of the nearby street, sounds of cars are carried toward us, rushing by as if fleeing from the same creature that waits patiently for us to drive ourselves mad and fall into its snare; until the digestive juices of the consuming and excreting, seemingly disembodied presence dissolve us and reassemble us, having sucked out of us all the necessary nutrients, yet retaining the memory and anticipation of the transformative pain shared with each lump of freezing earth.
Our bodies blend in the digestive system of something bigger than us; something that bends time struggling to maintain its safe linearity and space arranged according to our despotic design. Everything changes its place and purpose. The decomposition is accompanied by an intensification of the smell spreading in the wind smothering the lonely buildings. The smell of the world being devoured piece by piece, releasing from its chewed-up lungs the scent of both heavy smog and forests covered in brown, red and gold. Curved time forces us back again and again toward the moment of breakthrough. The last day of summer calls out to us from everywhere. It smells of anxiety and the warmth of coal stoves. It sounds like the hum of electrical systems and the hollow echo of heating pipes. Humidity heralds death with an airborne signal.
At some point, everything stops - the intense, familiar scent of decay, the rumble of an alien, barely audible voice speaking in an obscure language, the disintegration and dissolution of the threads holding reality together. The world freezes, as if it feels that the end of the wait has come, and in just a moment it will face in all its splendor what has been hiding in the shadows until now. A fragile moment of hope that leads nowhere every year, disappearing as quickly as it appeared. The world holds its breath. The last gasps of summer cease. The prey in the belly of the creature that invades our lives every autumn ceases its writhing and casts one last glance at the fading light at the mouth of the esophagus - the last rays of the sun bringing the solace of warmth. Soon the snow will fall, covering what has fallen in this place. Nothing will be different, only images and memories enchanted in the mud-covered doors of cars standing in parking lots, muscles trembling under jackets and sweaters, noses red from the biting cold, eyes tired of straining to see in the early approaching darkness. Soon the creature will leave, having eaten. What will be left is a void left by the weight of its heavy body.
The last day of summer will pass irretrievably, though the burning hearts trying to tear themselves from our chests to escape the being's disturbing presence will not be soothed by an icy wrap of snow - not for a long time. The snow falls later and later and stays for a shorter period of time, not giving the tissues wounded by autumn's decay a chance to regenerate. No one will know peace beneath its surface hiding the torn remains of the world's body from the gaze of an absent god looking indifferently from the skies. The smell of ice, the pungent air comes from afar, heralding the loss of something vital; the time needed to put together what the migrating being has trampled, living its life without awareness of the effect it is having on people who only happened to be in its path. The great arms of the mill of time spin, and we follow their jagged ends with our eyes, unable to either mend them or stop them to rest from their aimless effort. Time takes root in us, directing us to the same collision tracks again and again. We are approaching the center of the vortex when our fingers weaken and let go of the safety handles.
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