Creative Short Pieces

On Defining Nature

‘Nature’ found a new definition here, the same way that ‘home’ did. Home isn’t walking with Mom in the crisp fall air; watching as the autumn leaves do their little dance down, down, down to the snow-dusted ground. Now, home is an apartment on the 5th floor. It used to be the 4th, but they kicked us out to make room for more family housing. Plus, we had a fruit fly infestation. Gross.

Home is something new now, and I think I am ok with that. When we moved to the new unit, our hearts skipped a beat when we saw our new view of the downtown skyline. What a strange thing to think that four years ago I wouldn’t find these buildings or lights as exciting. I would’ve just seen boring, grey boxes, so unlike the one-story houses that make up my little snow globe town.

Now, I sit on my tiled balcony, overlooking a city of angels. The grey boxes have a deeper meaning tonight. They lay within a steel and concrete kingdom. They are iron and polished stone. They are part of something bigger. These grey boxes contain beauty that they were never intended to contain. Decades ago, some men built these shiny grey boxes into the sky; they grazed the clouds with their hammers and nails. (They were the masters of progress, work, and advancements; they saw the future). Now here I sit, taking in these vocational statues, but I don’t see what they saw. I see each window that’s embedded in the grey boxes, creating little nooks for people like me to sit and look out onto the city below. I see the neon lights from within them, glowing like those slivers of sunshine that peek through clouds when the rain gets bored with falling. I see the beams of metal that make little T’s and L’s, all the way up to the peak of the buildings; they balance on each other to make the boxes perfect, clean, even. How beautiful it is to think that things so mundane, things made for professionals and working people, paint such a pretty picture in the sky. It is as if, without even trying, humans create beauty, or maybe it is just that, without even trying, we find beauty.

On Los Angeles

I see the way the city lights pollute the air. They stick to the nitrogen and oxygen and suck the life out of them. The lights taint them and spread their hue, infecting the air with neon. And while I know these city lights pull the wool over our eyes, hiding us from the truth of the stars beyond, I can’t help but see their beauty. Because they are beautiful, in a sad, earth-destroying kind of way; the way they bounce from building to building, playing tag in a vast sea of atoms. I am not one to avert my gaze and pretend I don’t see how lovely they are. It is not my duty to humble them—there are higher powers that do that for me. Rain clouds visit and dampen the streets and the city lights; they muffle the luminance so as to say, “I am still bigger, still mightier than you.” Puddles plunder the gravel and steal each ounce of space until the ground belongs to the rain and clouds. But the city lights work hard to shine in their home, and they don’t enjoy being veiled. So, as the clouds shroud the neon glow, the city lights shimmy out from under and play in the puddles, and raindrops bounce, reflect, expand. The rain and clouds can only do so much amidst a force so resilient. So come tomorrow, puddles will shrivel and part ways with the cracks in the concrete. The clouds will whisper goodbyes to the skyscrapers and the people below, shake hands with the city lights, and promise to return soon; it is a battle that will forever be fought. I don’t care who wins, so long as I get to watch.