hint

I stood on the overpass, leaning over the rusted railing, the black artery below me pulsing with melted car lights. Each passing car is a separate, lonely soul absorbed in the same directional movement towards some promise that no one will ever fulfill. The air vibrated with a low, monotonous hum, as insistent and meaningless as my own weariness, deep, settled as the silt of a pond. It wasn't sadness. It was just the weight. Pure physical weight of being.

There was still a trace of gas station coffee in my mouth, that synthetic sweetness that tried to mask the bitterness but only accentuated it. I looked at those rushing lights below, at that organized chaos, and thought that we were all searching for some grand explanation, as if the universe owed us scripts with clear endings and morals. Or is the answer deliberately primitive?

Maybe the essence of essences is cream ice cream, plombyr. In a waffle iron. When the ice cream is finished, it softens and starts to leak sweet cold milk drops.

Not as a metaphor. Just.

I got off the overpass. A few hundred meters away, under the yellowish spot of a street lamp, the sign of a 24-hour shop flickered. The refrigerators hummed inside, and the sleepy saleswoman ignored me. I went back outside into the damp night air and sat down on a cold bench.

The first bite is a sharp stab of cold in the teeth, but after that a thick, indescribably simple cream sweetness blooms in the mouth. And with that taste, everything starts to melt. The hum of the overpass disappears. Gone is tomorrow's to-do list, the anxiety of unpaid bills, the sediment of grievances. All that scaffolding that holds up the fragile structure called "I" is crumbling. There is no past, no future, only this one, total moment, filled with flavor. I'm not a person who eats ice cream on a bench anymore. I am the taste itself. I am the cold that turns to sweetness. I am the quiet night air and the yellow light of the lamp and the distant sound of a passing car - everything flows into one, the point on the tongue that now holds the whole world.

Part of God? Maybe. Or maybe just a moment when you stop being too important.

I ate ice cream. The taste began to fade. The empty wafer residue melted between his fingers. Soon there will be nothing left. No answer, no relief.

But there was definitely a hint there.

It quivered in the air like a heat wave over hot asphalt. Elusive, formless. A suspicion that that brief, primitive taste was not an idle pleasure. That it wasn't an escape from meaning, but a brief, enervating encounter with it. As if you had accidentally touched something sacred and eternal with your fingertips, but in the dark, and now you could not explain what it was.

I sat, thinking about the echo of the secret that remained under my tongue.