Work Text:
I can’t turn around, can’t convince myself to. My whole life has been building up to this moment, and just a quick shuffle of my feet would reveal what such an instance could envision. It’s a bit too much to bear, for now, thinking back on how long it took and how hard it was and how many people gathered beneath this common goal, my life’s work. Instead, I cast my eyes out to the wondrous distraction in front, drinking in the views of the land.
Before me, a vast expanse of green and blue rolls in all directions, threaded through with dreary concrete grey and foamed, brilliant white. Trees collect on the open land, their branches shaded, leaves combed by yellowing tips. The sun curves off towards my right, its glow spilling liquid gold speckled apart by light, fresh yellow over the world, splaying tall shadows across planes with their pinned forms dark and cool in the still, morning air. The land over that side is drenched in the softening light, it’s greens more yellow and browns more orange, edges lessened.
I sweep my gaze to the left where the ocean seems to just about fall off the end of the world, its turquoise waves all jewelled and alluring and the complete opposite of what stands behind me. The clouds collected above fly low off the face of the earth, and no sign of rain or storms or crashing waves can be found in their lucid, legible patterns, their routine-drunk visages. From where I am, the pebbled, stony beaches aren’t in view, hidden away by crawling, hungry sea foam and tips of trees tipsy on the ablaze sunlight, though I’m sure their gravelly attire would look spectacularly alleviating on any other day.
On any day but this, when I am faced with the physical manifestation of my life’s work, all condensed into a single, looming structure. The smell from the river nearly at my toes is almost overpowered: the soft, musky, algae-littered bouquet trampled by the sharp aroma of humanity’s determination, shattered through with sulphur and struggle and synergy, foolishly sprinkled with a finishing touch of hopes for a better world, a better start, a better life. The smell of rotting egg is familiar, if a little too optimistic.
There is more of a breeze now, whipping at my hair, dragging at my eyes. It rolls over my fingertips like ocean waves, fresh and cold and lodged in nature. It covers my ears, buffets them with foam and fish and sand, brushing past my nose and clothes with frothed, thrown-around water. The smell of the ocean is barely there, waves off in the distance.
It’s really a freeze-frame, this view, the kind that you only see in films and books and minds, a panorama of one’s late-night wish. I sigh, breath tugged away by the wind, flushed fingertips limp by my withered sides.
Now, this scene has distracted me long enough – I think I might be ready, though my brain is slightly off, still caught up in this picture-perfect moment where time stands heavy and unmoving. I’ve wasted and wallowed copiously.
I breathe in, heart hammering away in my cage of bone, and move my feet: once, twice and then-
…I breathe out, wind roaring in my ears with its adorned, rippling fingers. There it stands, tall and towering in triumph and the tantalizing taste of a future. Our bravest attempt yet, proud in its three pillars of worn titanium and glass-coated silica, aspirations and lingering adversities in all their glory.
Before me, humanity’s most daring dreams to date stand compacted into this 72-metre vessel. My life’s work. Our hope, our dreams, our future. I think to myself then that maybe it was all worth it, in the end.