I walk through a spotless white hallway. The sterile walls glow with the light from the afternoon’s sun, glowing with the glistening light shimmering off of the city, and outside the window, a metallic rosebud blooms beneath a canopy of glass redwoods.
Inside the museum, I find a collection of photographs from the Columbian Exposition. In rich black-and-white, a statue of a woman hails toward a blossoming metropolis. Baroque domes and Roman arches sprout up around a manmade lagoon. Chicagoans strut through the riverside, all dressed in their finest suits and dresses, chatting and waltzing and looking so proud. They’re all so proud.
In a few of their faces I can just barely read,
“I wonder what the future will be,”
Or,
“At least I am young, now,”
Or,
“I wonder what he’s thinking of me.”
On the train home the sunset burns red into the skyline. If you told me the sun would burn through the glass right now, I would probably believe you. It’d light the rosebud on fire and the rosebud would wilt, hot orange metal flowing through Millennium Park like lava through Pompeii.
I think about the familiar sadness of looking at old photographs. About how the world I saw was an alchemy of memory and fiction and frozen moments. A promise coated in silver chloride.
I feel the guilt of seeing a world buried where our world stands. A world that couldn’t see our world coming.
If you told me the sunset would burn through the buildings I would believe you.
