désaveu

The moment everyone went silent, time all but halted and the clouds' undulations seemed to be put on hold, making them look like they were made of styrofoam, and tonnes upon tonnes of the stuff were about to tumble down onto the open spaces and houses in the city centre. We watched a glimpse of wry and dry humour in each other's eyes, as if the tree up our street had been felled down by the authorities to make way for the writhing tentacles a nearby highway was eager to extend. But none could know what was about to happen, and how abstract such a concrete thing would soon appear, as blackness engulfed us, closing in from the pavement and street lamps before devouring our very clothes and bodies. Funny, you might say, how soon material existence seemed but a concept thrown up in an introduction to philosophies, derided as one of those suppositions not even the extraordinarily intelligent could ever muster up the means to prove.
All we could do was to ponder what was, or had been - the threshold to the past got left at the doorstep to the moment, and the present seemed to be but an accumulation of memories. However, it dawned on our consciences that the past events which stayed with us were insignificant in comparison to single, elusively slippery instances which illuminated our inner senses in the brightest colours and most melancholy melodies. Pureness, or our innately flawed idea thereof, seemed close at hand, as remote as imaginable from any learned religious experience we could recount from the texts we'd pored over through dimly lit evenings. Infinitesimal crumbs of information whirred and whizzed through the dazzled flesh of our brains, orchestrating a mesmerising cacophony. This was the picture to eclipse the moon, the unsung Klavierlied, the perfect balance of plain and ornate.
But, like the first few seconds on a VHS tape, actual vision streamed in, unwelcome but unavoidable... and, again, how do you close your ears? The mundane details of the setting were decoded in an instant and everything seemed as before, and we realised that this piece of perfection we had felt to be in our firm grasp had been nothing but nothing all along, certainly in space and virtually so in time. Unperturbed, we dodged the rain and wind and purchased tickets from a small convenience store whose owner looked at us as if we'd just emerged from a fancy dress party, and, to be fair, he made the same unspoken impression on us. The bus was crowded, but we hopped on, bound for home.