Out Where The Great Black Rivers Flow

All my achievements in days of yore

Range from pathetic to piss-poor

But all that's gonna change

           

Because here comes sunrise

Yeah, here's your sunrise

I was driving along, late at night, with nothing serious on my mind.  Just a vaguely pleasant feeling of having accomplished something, of having done well and of seeing satisfying results come from my efforts.

I was coming from the hinterlands, from one of the outlying towns that was ancillary to the city I was now driving back into.  Earlier that night in the city I had met an outlier girl, from one of the outlying towns.  She had a sweet smile and gorgeous pale green eyes.  All legs and hips and tits and long-ish blond hair, and these fucking eyes that just mesmerized me, and drew me in closely to her.

After a time, we had ended up back at her place, back in her outlying town.  Just one side of a duplex, with two small bedrooms and a living area/kitchen, one bathroom I think, and not much else.  I heard the not unpleasant sound of freight trains rumbling by in the night, somewhere nearby, at regular-seeming intervals.  There was a full sized bed, in a smallish bedroom.  My outlier girl was on the bed, lying on her right side, with her face up very close to mine on the pillows.  She was looking at me intently, into my eyes, while I stroked the smooth skin on her back gently with the tips of my fingers.  It was as if she was trying to discern something, I couldn’t imagine what, as she lay there, staring into my eyes.

It was weird, but when we were really up close like that and I looked back at her in the semi-darkness, her face and eyes and visage in general took on a somewhat different appearance than normal.  The feeling I got observing this was very pleasant and intense, and I seemed to see it especially if she was being brought to some level of pleasure at the time.  I had the oddest impression that she was a chameleon of some sort.  Her entire being seemed to change in some slight but basic way when she was brought to the brink of physical ecstasy.

I was thinking about that as I drove along in the night.  Soon, I approached the Purple Heart bridge that would bring me back into the city.  As I began to make my way up the incline of the bridge, my own heart was beating evenly, and I felt pleasant and happy and at peace.

Then, as I was crossing over the bridge, I caught a glimpse of the great, black river flowing in the darkness underneath.  Ambient light from the city was playing off of the surface of the water here and there.  It startled me a little at first.  The river was basically benign in appearance, but at seeing the vast blackness beneath me, and the mysterious, unknowable river flowing through it, I was quickly robbed of my feelings of pleasantness, and peace.  Instead, I was filled with a vague sense of dread.  All our superficial happiness is forever being eroded away, by a silent black river that flows and flows down beneath us, out of sight and out of mind.  A great, black river that can occasionally be spotted, when a bit of light glints off its surface.  It is a bit chilling to be reminded that the river is down there, always flowing, always eroding.

As I came up over the crest of the bridge, I spotted the city laid out below, and saw on the distant horizon the earliest hint of dawn. Because of the odd combination of streetlights and lighted advertising along the highway mixed with the natural light just beginning to eke its way into the darkness, the city seemed to look a bit softer than it normally did.  And upon noticing, my mood began to soften, as well.  I had crossed the great black river, and was descending into a zone of familiarity and relative comfort.

Oh, I might from time to time consort with an outlier girl, and lie with her for awhile in her bed in her house in her outlying town, out in the hinterlands.  But in the end, even if it was the very end of the night, I always made my way back through the darkness, back across the wide, black river.  Back to home.

It is funny how a seemingly random arrangement of concrete and steel, glass and wood, blight and indifference and ugliness, can become so familiar over time they become pleasing to us, almost beautiful in their way.  These cold materials, arranged as they are and as we have seen them arranged for years and years, take on an aura of intense familiarity, and comfort, and safety.  As I descended to the foot of the bridge that night, and then continued on, to make the long curve around downtown, and out toward the residential areas on the west side of town, the dread I had so recently felt when crossing over the river receded.  A warm feeling of comfort slowly came over me to replace it.  I was home.  I had made it home, once again.

And somewhere out across the great black river, on the other side, in one of the outlying towns out in the hinterlands, there lay a beautiful outlier girl, her beautiful green eyes glistening in the semi-darkness of her small bedroom, in her half of a small house.  Her eyes were moist, but she was not crying.  She was in fact smiling, though mostly to herself; but if one looked closely, one could see on her lovely face, framed by her long, blond hair, a hint of her beautiful smile.  She was smiling, inside and out, because she knew that at about that same moment, this guy she’d met that night, and had brought home with her for awhile, was returning to his place in the city, beyond the great river.  And he was thinking that he’d returned safely to home.

To home.  Of course, home is where the heart is, as they say.  And at the thought of that, the beautiful outlier girl smiled to herself again, and then rolled over onto her side and pulled the covers up over the naked top half of her as she sank her head into her pillow.  She was happy, and at peace.  She slowly closed her eyelids over her beautiful eyes, robbing the universe of their light, at least for a little while.  And she fell gently to sleep, to the sound of a lone freight train rumbling by, somewhere out in the darkness.

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