Have you ever?
He was walking down the street, in a pensive mood, pondering a line
from a song he had heard while passing the open doors of a department store,
its melody drifting through the air like smoke from a cigarette, until it
finally dissolved into the surrounding bustle of the city. Cars were
spluttering, sirens were screaming and thousands of people tramped on the
concrete, like a squadron of ants marching to their anthill. The resulting
noise was a chaotic cacophony, a composition that never took shape, a tune that
was eternally tuneless.
He hated the city. It was not just the noise - he had become accustomed
to that after a while. It was the whole atmosphere of the place or, to be more
precise, the lack of it that he detested. It was dark and depressing, as if it
was enveloped permanently in the shadow of some great unknown. The buildings
towered over him as if he was being constantly stalked or observed. The streets
were cold and comfortless, filled with people who were impersonal and aloof. He
felt claustrophobic being hemmed in on all sides by concrete.
He disliked the underground too: so many people sitting next to one
another, people with potentially exciting characters and yet always choosing to
conceal their interior from the outside world like drawn venetian blinds in a
window. The mood struck him as morose, akin to sitting at a funeral, everyone
avoiding each other’s eyes and anxious to suppress any exuberant emotions.
Instead, all played the part of silent bystanders, respectful of those no longer amongst them.
In the city, people were mourning the very absence of soul.
Family, friends and all those who held him
dear, we are gathered here today to pay our last respects to The Soul of the
City. His passing has robbed us of a much-loved character who can never be
replaced. He will be sorely missed by all...
Have you ever been to a
place where there’s no love inside?
He certainly had, he was there right now. But despite his revulsion for
the Great Gloom (as he called the city) he never thought about leaving. He had
been here so long, ever since the day he was enticed in its direction, then
ensnared by it, bound to the city like man to fate.
It hadn’t always been this way, he sorrowfully reminisced. He thought
back to the time before Here and Now, before he had lost his soul to the Great
Gloom. He liked to refer to that time as the Light. In the Light he had known
happiness, fulfillment, an oasis of bliss. It seemed like an idyllic Golden
Age, a Garden of Eden, the likes of which many could but dream of.
He couldn’t bear to think long about the Light however, and before long
nostalgia would tend to be replaced by an oppressive melancholy, which
effectively blotted out any last hint of sunshine in his spirit.
Heavy-heartedly he resigned himself to a future as a prisoner of
darkness, stuck in his misery like a mouse running endlessly in a tread-mill,
whose only choice is to plod on and on. All he longed for was one trivial but
unobtainable pleasure: the rosy-fingered touch of the Light on his body and
soul.
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