Annalee Cott sometimes forgets to breathe.
From a distance the city looks so beautiful. She can sit in the park with the sun freckling her shoulders and white perfect clouds rolling occasionally across its surface, their shade the closest to a lover’s gentle caress she has ever known, and she can appreciate the beauty of the city. Its towers of glass reflect the sun and seem a part of it, stretching into the sky, beautiful pathways to their perfect, shining world. A place with no disease, with the numbing equality of non-divergence that has its own kind of crushing beauty, the safety of the cog in the machine, that Neolithic elegance of inevitability. Annalee Cott can appreciate that as she worms her toes into the deep emerald grass and breathes air laced with salt spray.
But the buildings cast shadows.
Great pools of darkness that overwhelm the people, invisible from this distance, that she knows must be walking their preset paths through the concrete blasted wasteland beneath the all-seeing eyes above. When she is there, among them, the world is not Utopic. The shadows breed dirt, washed off the shining buildings above by pressure washers and window washers, must keep the monoliths perfect, can’t have a monument to idealistic capitalism with hints of the rotten fruit beneath. She stands sometimes weighed down under the bulk of invisibility and it isn’t so much that she cannot breathe as that she forgets. It seems every step she can and must take has been preordained, that the world is so much larger and so impossible and she has such a tiny place in it that nothing she does matters; that she will move inevitably through this molasses and there is no reason to lift a hand against it.
And then her lungs burn, and she remembers. No one keeps her breathing but herself. And if she is in charge of this most basic aspect of her own life, how many other responsibilities does she clutch in her unknowing hands? How much change could this one cog create if it fell out of line?
And then she smiles.
And Annalee Cott takes a deep breath in.
Image courtesy of Hayley Mechelle Bouchard. Her work can be found at Little Cat Photography, with more information about Hayley on Our Contributors page.