Red, Green, and the Orange in between

I run the red lights.

People stop, but like I do, their eyes run with me. It takes five seconds to reach the other line parallel to the other so I can finally disappear to the crowd. Five seconds of guilt. Five seconds as the thoughts disappear and steal their gaze while their words rumble in the rush and the wait and the slow motion in between.

The sky is a vast page of blue; a shade I can't understand. Cables and wires and buildings vignette over me. I don’t see birds, just a plane trail cutting the page in two. Thin clouds hover on the horizon; grayish silhouette of the moon contrasted the blue parade; they disturb me.

Whoever designed the sky; I don’t like his taste.

To be honest, I don’t have much idea about colors. In truth they’re just mixtures of red, green, and blue in their venn intersections. They’re just euphemisms of labels and identity, because if they’re not, I wouldn’t have run the red lights. They impose the rush and the halt and label people in the wait. Perhaps, they don’t really make sense, too, because if they do, we wouldn’t have painted them the way we could understand, but the way they’re meant to be understood.

The truth is; we're just good at manipulating people. We’re good at make-believe. Set up a standard, tell them what's best and what's not.

I look up at the sky, again.
I’s just a shade of something else I’m never going to picture.

Beneath is a crowd composed of different faces I’m never going to remember. Different people pass, but for me, they’re all the same. Just like me, too, who thinks he’s different, but then, how are we different if everyone thinks we’re all different? Maybe we just can’t accept that we’re just fractional versions of other people, compressed from different packages.

We think we know everything despite the fact that we’re only ten percent of what we think we are.

It’s seven in the morning. People wear their Sunday’s best. There’s a lady in white, a guy in blue, a student in jagger, a man probably in his early thirties hops off to the rush hour, a guy in an all-white who must be a nurse, a man in a pale-blue suit, probably heading to the office, a beggar, a boy, a queer, a professor, and everyone on the crowd past everyone. Then there’s me, a nocturnal guy lost in the crowd, pulling that turtle-neck to his nose, evading people’s glances, ashamed of his ugly features. His hands are clenched, tucked in the pockets of his coat. He pace faster to avoid everyone, and looks away soon as he catches their eyes.

Perhaps, hating everyone reflects just how much we hate ourselves.

Despite my gaze on the ground, I still see how they all stride past me in three steps per second; how they all lay their eyes for two seconds and veer back.
Their eyebrows meet against the sun.

Everyone’s packing up to leave.

I wonder how do I look at a distance—how I may be intimidating or mysterious who doesn’t look back, or perhaps just another dull and boring person to pass on the way. This is one of the many things I’m never going to know, and feel. You know, I’m just a stranger, too, whose face is forgotten as I disperse into the crowd.

I’m just another shell of exploding questions and veridical consciousness, who throws queries and arguments despite I’m never going to get respective answers.

I look up at the sky, again, and strain my gaze. My eyes blink every second, until I swerve to the street and notice the people and their rush; I imagine the alley without people, just me and the morning, and my loneliness. Maybe the light doesn’t really seem annoying at all—it’s not rush hour at all. The space will be a little wider, enough to succumb on my selfishness. The sky is a little bit better and I can probably stare at it a little longer, a little bolder. Maybe I won’t even realize how the sky and its bluishness take my consciousness—for five seconds—no, for five minutes.

I just know it’s blue.
It’s so blue.