burn your bridges

I had a hangnail.
“Stop biting your nails”, he said, “you’ll chew your fingers off”.
And I put my slender hand down, and kept my eyes on the floor of the car. He would drive fast. He liked the feeling of everything going by.
We went down the road to the center of the city to see the lights. It was a concrete city. Tall, and empty. Cold and dead. To get there you had to go by the factories and oil refinery that would spark fires in the sky when letting off gas. You could only see a glimpse of them from the car window. No one lived in the city anymore. Some of the elevators still worked and you could go up into the old apartments and offices with furniture in them. We would sit in the chairs and sofas that were splitting at the seams, and look at what the water damage had done to the ceilings. We would try to figure out which stain was what country. All the buildings we went to had sheets of papers littering the hallways. Sometimes you could find ripped letters and photographs. Time went slower in the city. The town halls’ clock tower had stopped, along with all the other clocks and you could never really know what time it was. My watch broke. We didnt really have time.
We were strangers before, and when it happened it went on for too long.
The left over smog gives you amazing sunsets in the city. Bold orange light that makes you feel warm.
It was our city. We killed afternoons there when nothing was on TV. Our city had a buzz. You could feel it. It had the noise of old florescent lights. Sometimes I could feel it flowing through me like an electric current from all the TV and radio signals. All the cell phone connections. It came through my body like a wave, echoing inside my chest cavity. Like a flapping bird in its cage.
There were times when I could feel it stronger and stronger until it was getting out of hand. I didn’t want to get rid of it and tried to hard to hold on to it. It was a feeling to strong to hold on to. You were a feeling to strong to hold on to. I remember everything.
We would walk in the middle of the empty roads and watch the stoplights change from red to green, and watch the brick buildings slowly crumble. We had all been waiting for something to happen and it finally did. We were left alone to revel in it.
“Its time to meet new people” he said. And I didn’t know what to say.