staff

The past is an abandoned railway that has been on the outskirts of the city. The rails, two rusty scars are still here, but the trains are no longer driving them. I go to them slowly, carefully, as if to fall into time. Under the feet, crushed chips, and old wooden refugees, crushed and blackened, are a squeeze between lush weeds. It is those weeds, those wild flowers that persevered through the rotten wood, and are the real memory - not the event itself, but what has overgrown it.

In my head I turn one, perfectly polished memory. Summer day, so transparent that it even hurts the eyes. Your laughter, bouncing from pine trunks. Everything is as bright, as real as a movie that I can release whenever I want. I feel that warmth, that lightness of carelessness. This is my safe place, my fortress, built from what was.

I stop. I swipe my fingers through the rusty metal covered with a moss. Orange, velvet dust remains on the skin. I look at them.

What a talented falsifier I'm. What a masterful landscape, becoming a rotten canvas.

After all, there was never that laughter. And the day was not so sunny. And maybe we stood in a completely different place. Those refugees - the facts - long ago, but weeds - feeling, longing, fiction - combined them into lush, live carpet, which is now so nice to walk.

I kneaded rusty rust. They fall on the ground like dead spices. I look at the trail in front of me. In addition to those weeds, in addition to this sweet lie, everything would have long been dusty. Sometimes beauty is just glue that holds what had to break long ago.

The heat, sticky and heavy, keeps the city on the third day in its hostage, turning the asphalt into a soft and air -breathing syrup. I sit on the floor in an apartment where the silence is so thick that I hear the fridge and my own blood in my ears. Each thing - your book left on the table, its folded angle - is a silent reproach. No, no reproach. The small, hot stone I have to swallow, but it gets stuck in my throat.

Love should be something else. It is not this ingrown scar that does not harvest, but is bathing from the inside, pulsing with heat. I remember your fingers, always cool, leading to my neck, and that memory now is like touching a hot stove. Contrast that burns. You want to hate you for that coolness, for being now no longer, that you have left me alone in this viscous soup. Anger rises slowly, lazily, like a bubble in a boiling resin.

There is a glass of water left on the windowsill, left in the morning. It is now lukewarm, the sun warmed up. I take, a sip. The water has a metal taste, as if I were licking an old key.

Your key.

I put a glass back. So strongly that it slips. The sound turns the silence like a knife stab.

And then I stand up. When I approached the window, I open it with a sudden movement.

I inspire.

The future is not a highway that flows to the horizon, but slowly, overnight, the shopping center in the middle of the night. Standing a dazzling white, without windows, its ventilation shafts monotonously growl like artificial lungs, pumping conditioned, no -smelling air into the empty halls. I stand on the other side of the road, in the old asphalt island, and I feel like the last local, watching the colonizer ship.

In my head, not fear, but strange, annoying fatigue, as if I had been filling out an endless questionnaire all night. All the fields are already marked, all the options are considered, and now we have to wait for confirmation that my application to live is accepted into the system. No intrigue. No secret. Only the procedure. The sky above the mall is like a faded screen where the inscription will appear, "Please wait. Your future is processed."

Suddenly, a gust of wind opens an old newspaper lying under his feet - a moment is enough to read yesterday's headline about the future economy forecasts. I guess if this type of information has ever been useful to me. I can't come up.

I look at that white wall, that buzzing, a soulless box, and I realize she's not afraid of me. She doesn't even see me. I am only a temporary anomaly in its sterile field of view, a short failure that will immediately be corrected by the service staff.

Or maybe this thought is cold water washed away fatigue - maybe I am that staff? Arriving prematurely, without tools and without instructions, standing on the other side of the road and naively waiting for him to start work.

Then how did I get here? And are you voluntarily?