Holding on Tight

Angela Du

I grasped the railing as I stared down the cliff.

You can do this, I whispered.

I took a tiny step forward, but I pondered another “what if…?”

My hair billowed out and I stared into the ocean,

I watched a boat drift,

The fierce white bubbles crashing against it.

I feel my foot lift from the gray concrete jungle,

And just as I’m about to descend to the rushing waves,

It all vanishes, as though I’d let it fumble.

I could almost feel it rushing beneath my toes, but then I remembered,

I’m no longer in that little bungalow,

But here.

In this place where gray seems to reign, in this place that rumbles,

Wires. Bricks. Trains. Cars.

Civilization.

Nothing here, I reprimand myself.

Of course there would be no fruit on trees of asphalt,

All they want from here is wealth.

My thoughts shifted and I wished,

Did we only care about our own health?

Did the ocean not provide us with our first life?

How could the earth then take its next breath?

I descend the gray slabs of concrete,

Exit the stairwell,

And return to the outdoors starched gray and bleak.

Breathe the smog filled air,

Look up at the rusting gray “plants” with clouds of gray full of conceit,

And almost imagine I’m home.

But of course, the gray sky looks nothing like home,

The rough cement nothing like sand falling through my fingers,

The empty gray fields nothing like the dock I’d used to roam,

The beeping machines nothing like the echoes of the rushing waves,

This place is nothing like what I used to know.

Nothing like the blinding golden glow of the sun in my eyes,

Nothing like the way the water would flow through my toes,

But of course, how could a rusting gray tower look like a palm tree?