and now for something in poor taste...
there is a particular shade of gray, cold morning gray, a dirty tone of gray that i love. 6 am september mornings from 1987 gray. fm news radio in the background, faint smell of coffee and hot chocolate, eggs and toast, five more minutes before getting ready for school kind of gray. it's too early and school is on the other side of bogotá and the bus ride is long and pleasant and you have enough time and stillness to daydream kind of gray. there's a unique, comforting smell that you don't notice when it starts disappearing from your life, the pleasant scent of a lunchbox with a yogurt cup, a sandwich and an apple in a classroom on a day too rainy to go out and the world feels kind of still and cozy kind of gray. i like the world when it is unnaturally still. a part of me finds it inconvenient, but most of me appreciates being stuck under a ledge while it pours. there's nothing else that i can do but to be there and wait as the impatience turns to boredom turns to daydreaming. i liked going for walks in between quarantines, when the streets were devoid of any human trace, when a misanthropic rumor was beating underneath the fear and the air tasted fresher and images of trees growing to impale expensive cars and water running through avenues and moss growing on billboards and bushes twisting around and through bicycles and animals roaming through the remains of a cinnabon, would make you happy in a hyperballad, somber fascination by both our improbable lives and our annihilation and the jolt of that cognitive dissonance throwing little things off of a cliff kind of gray. i hope that's the shade of gray the whole universe turns to once we've lost control of self-replicating technology and [e v e r y t h i n g] turns into one thing, when time stops, when the particles that once made us are fed to voracious nanomachines and turned to and endless field kind of gray. that would be nice.