On the Road
He awoke in that windless hour of morning where strange plants take root and populate the vacant air. West Egg was as yet mute and hazy with the slip of a new moon leaning by the rim of the world, and a trail of clouds in wistful remembrance to its descent.
Last night's magic, all alight with the casual magic of youth—and gone by morning: how peculiar, these waltzing moths, they withdrew, leaving their slow graceless circles as he became insistent to recognize them. The party was over, with only the host present by morning. Strange that adults whom were social as an occupation looked for love in all the wrong places.
Outside the magnolias were repetitive along the arbour, the undergrowth murmured to itself and pansies were emblems of the days gone by—they had begun to wither.
A figure stood in the slow mists of an uncertain hour at dawn, somber and sturdy amongst the gauds of streamers and fairy-lights. He leaned by the doorway, and the breezes ruffled the stillness of his house's interior.
The figure turned to him and called out, "We should be leaving now."
He left the house that morning. West Egg glittered even afterwards, but it lacked the light that once breathed all over it.
All is flux. The road is neverending.
The afternoon agreed with his sentiments. Or rather they played a subtle accompaniment to the day's expression.
The engines humming had been sullen and pervasive, its notes bouncing off the panes of summer's muggy heat, and the hazy black rims sweltering around his eyes—noon, the long hour of noon as Nick had driven on and on. A straight, unwinding strip of beaten earth. He recalled the nights on which girls bloomed, splendid orchids and their plume-like limbs lost in the mellow daze of alcohol, there had been saxophones and trumpets, men were eloquent and expressed trivialities with the long foreign words which spoke: education. He recalled people, and in their eyes the absence of all desire.
It was afternoon when he ascended to the present. They stopped the van, veering off the path. Nick had been silent as well, perhaps gathering the pieces of unrecorded months, all dazzling, all resplendent, all pointless. It was an era that had introduced itself and left within the interval between legal adulthood and true maturity.
Nick spoke, drawing his vowels long and flat and the background of his upbringing; it's been a long ride.
He continued: We'll stop here awhile.
Outside was thick with foliage and the woodwind, almost murky and his steps were met with the mumbling grass.
And the clouds shifted, sunlight flooded the wood, falling in tremulous winks through the gaps in time-woven boughs, and it transmuted the leaves from green to gold.
He remembered the inescapable fair hair and the thought about the unadulterated land of love they had shared at seventeen.
Night bloomed, casting long blue shadows over the sands as a moth's faint wings brushed his cheek, an exhalation of the half-light.
He found himself thinking in snowy sentences: would that every night be as tender.
Nick's posture was familiar yet transformed against this background, amorphous and not fully human.
Day had just adjourned, heliotrope falling in disassembly and his own eyes were beautiful and pure in the reflected glory of all he had seen.
Night continued to swarm in slow passages of repetition. It played its own unheard sonatas.
I would like to request a favour of everyone: please review.
1) is the story
a) good
b)too confusing
c) does it sound like I am trying to be cleverer than I am
2) is the mood:
a) romantic--as in beautiful, idealistic
b) non-existent
c) smothered because the writing is too heavy
3) what is the style like?
4) what is the relationship between the narrator and Nick?
Thank you.