Burn these city lights into my memory: the way they reflect in midnight waters like a diamond necklace in the sun; the way traffic lights sometimes fall asleep amidst an unscripted musical - cars decked in red brake lights, joyful yellow taxicabs, awkward blaring trucks and tourist buses in tacky pastel hues like cheap synthetic frocks; monstrous machines breaking down battered sidewalks, strangers’ silences mirrored in bright green glass bottles that wait quietly in the rubble; the way young trees, leaves lined silver with fallen smoke, still dance with the winds of accidental summer thunderstorms. remind me of prideful skyscrapers, air-conditioned waiting rooms, imitation leather, prim paper-cups and coffee machines - precious raindrops on a high sunburnt window glass. remind me, then, of forecasted weather, scorching ultraviolet, partly-cloudy skies; imagine a smudged-lipstick sunset - warm dust of a bare cemented terrace beneath your bare feet, sundried wind in your hair- then paint me a memory, like an ever-changing faerytale… and another… and another... until their world dissolves into an airplane-studded sky. When these whitewashed walls crumble - when, perhaps someday, the earth wakes into a new, breathing era, a foreign, vibrant, intoxicating warmth of a world that echoes with wonder; when I fall in love with clear blue sunlight and mellow moons that sketch our silhouettes on unbound lands, remind me, one last time, of my home. T. E. Pyrus