Okay, so like, so like, what if you and me -

What if we went out walking.

What if we went out stomping, breaking bottles beneath our boots, kicking out lit candles, just sort of, you know, wandering up side-streets and up the sides of sky-scrapers. Sneaker laces trailing behind us, fifty stories up in sky.

The naked cities’ got like, what, a million and a half stories to tell every day? A couple dozen more than that you could tumble down from - suicidal swan divers and them that’s just been pushed. 

We could get kinda pushy. We could get all up in somebody’s business.

Knocking over trash-cans and gas-stations. Burning the cash for cheap kicks. Teenage kicks, right through the night. All the way out, so deep into the city we’re climbing trees and discovering strange new species of plastic-shelled insect monsters.

We’re discoverers, in our backyards. We brought an alien planet back down to earth to conquer, and now it’s getting turned into a firm dirt road beneath our feet.

My friend’s wearing one of those big long coats like in a John Woo movie; it rolls after my friend like a wave of liquid midnight-blue. My friend lifts twin barrels, like in a John Woo movie, and shoots the centre of the sun out from the sky. 

She shoots the centre of the sun right outta the sky.

We weren’t held back by fear, we were held aloft by it. Fear forced us up, into the sky, off the ground, and ever onwards. Fear forced us to never look back. Fear compelled us, drove us, insisted that we go further and be more.

She was also so scared of her family, so scared of winding up back there again. She stitched together great bloody wings from sheet metal, and she kissed the cloudscape. 

He was scared of spiders, and anything else that could climb into his body through a hole in his skin, and start laying eggs up inside of him, eggs full of little beasts that would hatch out and eat his flesh to survive. He created himself a suit of armour as thin as a breeze and as solid as the mantle of the earth; he put it once, and then it never came off. He explained that he’d rather be untouchable than to live in that world of doubt. I don’t know how he slept before, but it was like a baby after his helmet got fully attached. 

Me, what was I scared of? The sound of my own voice? Alien thoughts being implanted in my head through the unexpected application of my own creativity? I was scared of the abstract, of the innately unknowable. I was forced to adapt to things I couldn’t foresee or perceive. I became more than my environment could know; I ate up the dreams that others left around, and I shot the night cold with constant levels of low hostility that burned within me like an angry hive of bees set alight.