Sanctuary

I am pregnant with a city. It pushes insistently at the walls of my damp paper skull, eager to unfurl its dimensions. Over time this metropolis has acquired a gravity of detail, spinning now under its own volition, the gestation of furtive imagination.

Its inhabitants, a few as neurotic, as sweaty as real friends, the rest little more than wraiths, walk amidst architecture with foundations of memory and daydream. Buildings snatched from history and mythology, bolted together with images from photographs and movies, cemented with lines from articles idly read in waiting rooms. Its sun is a roiling sapphire disc, endlessly consuming itself, puddling the shadows. Alas, the weather is still clichid. Melancholy invariably brings rain, drama predictably evokes thunderstorms, brief orgasms of lightning.

The city gutters are slick with mysteries, fecund with adventures as numerous as faces, each eager to pluck me from the banality of the external world. Yet to materialise this brooding city has to squeeze through the needle head of my mind, fashioned from words that fail to bare its titanic weight, buckling its baroque architecture so that it fatally collapses in upon itself. Even those companions who speak most forcefully in my imagination arrive as stillborn ghosts. It would seem more humane to let them continue to dwell within the dank comfort of my head but writers are cruel and selfish, and that degree of compassion could only be bought at the expense of my need to show them to this world, this city.