A wandering stranger
Some time ago, it was almost a speck; a boy I knew, but he was a strange guy. I didn’t know exactly who he was, but I could relate to him somehow. He loved to wander around in streets, even parks, the bay, under the night, lidless sky could not bind him away. I’d see him from time to time, walking. To no end. He would pass through the canals, cross the bridge, delve below a tunnel, and keep walking. He didn’t exactly know where he was going I thought; he kept moving back and forth, even looking yond his shoulder back. Whether paranoid or no, he seemed cautious. A hint of anxiety kept him, but he still kept going, somehow.
Beside the fact: this was years ago. I can’t believe it – five years. It was that long for a man his age; but five years can be five minutes in a squared amount of time. Anyway, I followed him. I wanted to know what he was doing, where he was walking, where he was going, the air he breathed, the sights he saw, the cars he heard, the people who laughed, and all the swans that swum past the brewing glow. This glow nought I had, in bitter thought comes shaking sleep. ‘Tis sound alone he ought to keep, the rest is bark to sleep. In this space, in this hour, half his sight was cast in gaze, the rest is brought in dark ahead.
Some hour later, he stopped where I just knew where he would stop. This was it. I cried. This was it. It all happened here. The beginning of an evening; the end of the morning; the start of endless night eclipsed by sun under the farthing sun. Everything just fades; echoes – echoes, into the fold. A sound deep, be it consumed in dark. Within this realm, there were no street lights, no. It was all different, you see. A bridge was yond from here, and there were lights, with some not lit. It seemed like it dimmed a road, and this was where he followed through.
Step by step, breath from breath, reduced to congealed blood that soured his heart, soon he kept his pace. His heart boiled and kettled vapour through each lung that sunk cold breezy air and dispersed a new life into the air around him. Within this dark manifold of sempre solitude shook the break of his communal worship in the gait that forsook his brow that gestured at the slightest sound that cast him from here to worlds above, so far from he, and not so far from reach.
Beneath two towering blocks, whose fumes used to bring gaze from all the city at long lost thoughts of musing jeer, at fusing cloth brought freezing fear fraught with a demise of a lost city buried under nostalgic price in gaping memory of one so lost. He stood beneath the biggest tower, sat on the grass, breathed the air. Thus seeing five brilliants of the night, felt four fragments of memory, heard thrice a wolf, a distant footstep and a ripple wrung with stone; twice he smelt a cool air and the smell of distant trees bellowing before him. Once he breathed, he became whole again. Once he breathed, he became me again.
