Gems IV by Celer

From Will Long

It is scarcely a month since I landed, and time has felt like it hasn't moved in ages. The voyage across the ocean was a trial, with sweeping white waves amid a grey expanse where nothing moved but my stomach, which felt perpetually inverted, as I lay bent like an angel over the side of the boat, gazing eyelessly into a blank abyss. Rats infested most of the lower portions after the first week, and I thought we'd all be eaten or either starved by the time we arrived. I expected something much more glorious when I arrived, a grandeur of lights and smiles, ticker tape parades and famous faces waving from the windows. But the reality blended into something more amorphous, with blank faces blackened by work in dank factories, smokestacks spilling a black spume into the sky, and lights and night that crackled with gunshots as if firecrackers were constantly lit off. It would seem like a celebration, save for the screams of agony and and cries of woe from the alleyways.

Now I sit where I imagined a parade of summer vacationers, near a beach next to the largest city, a pleasure palace, a circus and fair for all kinds, with a boardwalk that seems to be opening up to the sky. What I imagined, turns out to be completely silent, save for a few drunken blabberings from the amidst the heaps of rubbish blown into corners. The beach has turned into an amalgamation of ground seashells, and the waves come across with crushing sweeps that bring tears of dry windburn to my eyes. It's rarely what I wished, but it's all that's left, here in the last place called Paradise.

Celer is Will Long, an American artist.

celer.jp
open.spotify.com
music.apple.com
tidal.com
Instagram