Finally I see her, the fast descending sun coating her hair in a glowing grey. I continue to look further, into a vulgar, smoky gloom discoverable only behind the tattered banner – all I can see are restless silhouettes and desperate eyes, but their suffocating, noisy chatter is distinctly audible. As I listen to their nonsensical hysterics I become aware of a rich, joyous quality to their idiocy: in spite of their cheapness, their lack of class, they are carefree; the severity and callousness of existence, of impending death, is incomprehensible to them and thus they are - and always will be - happily bewildered. Fortune saved my flight. Just as the sun was beginning to diminish, empathic droplets of opals and diamonds and rubies and emeralds exploded, like an electric shock, from the beaming sky. The downpour was brief, but effective; my pilot could turn on the backup engines and continue tentatively on through the dimly-lit sky. Before, I had dreaded the approach of my inevitable destination, yet as the light dwindled further, I felt a serene relief in the prospect. The rasping speaker warned us it was time to descend, and, despite the aching, it was relatively comfortable. Jess had long ago become too benign to be of any conversational interest, her face clouded in a ghostly grey. Thus I sat carefully, gazing contemptuously ahead through strained, bleak eyes whose pupils had turned grey in the smoke.The neon had become stained, whilst the banner was drowning in a dazed, unsurprised manner. As the impenetrable blackness of my destination appeared I gazed at Jess, close beside me, slumped and pale against a tightly shut window, and I thanked the newly-buried sun that my journey went on.
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