Wet cobblestones, oh how we loved wet cobblestones; most preferably around 5 pm, roundabouts November when dusk hung heavy on the London streets, wagon wheels clip clopping along, and then…the rains began.
Sheets and sheets of rain, so heavy as to recall waves at the beach. Nothing moved now in the city but the water. Water water everywhere as his friend Samuel once wrote, washing away the soot, the grime, the poverty, the despair, the buildings both grand and grim, the edifices of the Hanover’s, the Tudors, yea, the armor of Alfred the Great as he hid amongst the marshes.
Until then, he too, and his ragtag band slid into the sea, Roman mosaics and stone walls not to mention jewelry, pottery and all the other paraphernalia of a presumptive civilization seeking to so-called civilize the barbaric isle. Now, rain, clouds and water and soon, even the land of the isle itself, submerged and lost but then conjoined with its ancestral origin, Atlantis.
Yea, Atlantis, she of legend and lore, the world before all the other worlds, until she herself succumbed to great hubris and the world before all worlds reclaimed its rightful ownership of the spheres, and now here we were, Samuel and I, longing for our quiet absinthe in the corner tavern, loving our dim and dark gas lamp lit cobblestoned view of the empire’s denizens, both dignified and dissolute.
We supposed ourselves neither, for we knew we kept one foot on the cobblestone and one on dust of stars both ever burgeoning to life and collapsing into the death of a liquid boundarylessness, the sea of all worlds in one. We drained our glasses and smiled, and against all tavern keeper warnings of dire fate exited into the maelstrom, never having been, and always becoming. Just as the cobblestones began to dry in the morning light.