So I was going for a walk the other day, right? And maybe I had taken an edible
before I left—one of those gummy ones—growing up I used to think the default
edible was a brownie, but now it's all about these gummy ones—I guess they're
easier to get the dose right for and keep longer and economies of scale and
regulation and all that, but still, it'd be nice to be able to buy a proper
old-fashioned special brownie from, like, the bakery—but there I was on the
walk and maybe the gummy edible had started to kick in or maybe I was just
feeling very calm and at peace with the world without the aid of mind altering
substances, maybe it was the cool breeze on my face and the gentle lapping of
the river that had altered my mind, but I was almost home, so it had probably
been long enough for it to really have been the edible. Everything felt slow
and calm and relaxed-like. I had to cross one more bridge and then I'd
basically be home and so I was taking my time, strolling along. Now I had just
gotten onto the bridge, but I wasn't yet at the part of the bridge that goes
over the river. See, the bridge starts at street level and rises slowly and
then crosses over a highway and then over a strip of park and then finally
over the river. So I'm walking on the gradually ascending part of the bridge
and to my right a little bit away is a big brick wall. The wall isn't
free-standing or anything like that; it's attached to a building like normal,
but it doesn't have any windows, at least no perceivable windows. Maybe it has
teeny tiny windows that I never noticed. But this wall's maybe five or six
stories tall and real wide and it's got this huge mural on it, but that's not
really important to the story at all. The mural, that is. The wall is
important, but the mural on it isn't. It's a nice mural, one that I enjoy
looking at in general, but on this day while I was walking over the bridge,
it wasn't the mural on the wall that I was looking at, but something else. You
see, the sun was setting over to my left while I was walking over the bridge,
casting (the sun was) long shadows over to the right while I walked forward
over this gradually ascending part of the bridge. The sun was casting long
shadows onto the wall to my right. So I was walking over the bridge and my
shadow was walking along the wall. I slowed down and watched my arms' shadows
swing idly along as we walked together. But now the bridge has this low wall along
the outside of the sidewalk to keep people from falling off, I suppose, but it
looks nice, too, being all crenelated and whatever. And so as the bridge
rises, this wall rises too, not gradually like the bridge, but step-wise, so
that every few steps now, my long shadow on the building to my right is slowly
and step-wise swallowed by the swelling darkness. First the tips of my fingers
are gone. Then the wall rises again and I'm just a pair of shoulders and
a head, bobbing and swinging. Then the wall rises again and I'm
nothing but a head floating along. I was almost at the edge of the building
when I paused to watch as my shadow's severed head rolled along without me,
off the wall and over the highway and across the narrow park and into the
river. It plunged into the little waves and disappeared. I smiled and laughed
and said goodbye: