'Twilight'

[Listening to: 'A Thousand Paper Cranes' by Mono]

It was a few minutes past seven. I felt it rumbling outside. Then I heard, lost amidst the late evening construction work, but still minutely prevailing as a murmur, the sounds of pitter-patter. Hurriedly I went on to the sink to wash my hands and later, my face. Before I left, I looked out through the high opening of the room and saw a vague representation of rain, but dismissed it shortly thereafter as an illusion attributed to being in front on the computer screen for the whole day (a few hours too long). Once I had been walking to my usual bus stop in the middle of the city after work when I saw what I initially thought was the beginning of rain, only to stop and hold my palm out to nothing.

I readied my collapsible umbrella from my backpack after punching out, and came out to a scene where the security guard was talking to an Indian woman. They were conversing beside the main road, and though it was dark, it wasn't raining. I walked all the way to the bus haunt, umbrella in hand.

Shortly after passing a school, along a road they called 'Light Street', I came to a structure previously unnoticed or seen. Two statues in the form of cherubs met me there, each sitting at extreme ends of what I saw as an empty bookshelf, about two meters high, above ground. I was only paying attention to the one which I passed last, and saw that it was fashioned with a book in its left hand, while a pen was held in its right, eloquently poised as if it was in the middle of a narration, and the story's lesson or apex was approaching:

Learn enough and you'll get to Heaven.

That was all I could think of, at the time, the first time. I guess not many will play the same game of 'what does this structure represent?' when they see it. Most of them who have already noticed it are students. Students who had gathered and waited for their respective rides home during the hot noon sun's peak, after school. "Angels!," they would exclaim to one another excitedly at first. And though the fact is constant, they would later go on to forget it when they leave; dismissed: the image of the cherubs interchangeable with anything else that has become A Familiar; the curiosity to know and understand the meanings eventually irrelevant and gone.

Perhaps, in growing, we all become our own Islands.

Learn enough and you'll be an Island.

( _")