Midnight was fast approaching, and as the city around me resonated with the traffic and flow of night life, heavy winter raindrops trickled against the streets. I wandered aimlessly, lost and uncertain of how I got here. Without warning a wave of bodies crashed behind me. A seething mass of noise and movement engulfed me, and just as quickly ceased. Looking towards the departing throng, I could make out the figures of young teenage boys and girls with their ravaging, hungry hearts. Suddenly I felt dispossessed in this place, set adrift in a world that I no longer had any part of. Yet something brought me here.
Vaguely he remembered, though tarnished by memory, the distant echoes of pain, loss, and sorrow. This pain was no longer just mental, obscured as it was by the passage of time and the complicity of my brain. Yet still it pulled me under and back towards the remnants of my past unfinished life.
Around me the swell of human traffic surged again. Caught now in it‘s undertow, I had to move quickly within it’s fast, free flowing current to avoid collisions and the sudden crush of the crowd. I sidestepped elbows and veered around swaying shoulders. Until eventually I found shelter inside the wake of a large group of young students heading towards their next bar. It was here that a memory of Clara sparked suddenly inside my brain. Why had it taken so long for me to remember her? And what had happened between us? I needed time to think and to figure out what was happening to me.
An alleyway opened up to my left, I dived into it relieved to escape the crowded and choked streets. I needed to find Clara, to find out what happened. Disparate memories still littered my past, an event, an argument and a struggle followed only by whit...
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...avens spread out like a spiders web.
He looked at his feet and was nearly surprised to find himself on the ledge of the roof of his apartment building. Legs quaking beneath him and his shirt nearly soaked as he was precariously perched upon the ledge.
Peering beyond him he saw reality as it truly was undisguised, plan, horrendous yet magnificent.
So it was true. Two children flounced crazed, wild, a puddle of tears beneath their feet. Their fear mixed with dread and their eyes ablaze with desperation and insanity. Adrenaline and fits of hysteria bubbling, rippling, warping (No. That was just his imagination.) Or was it?
His chest throbbed as his heart threatened to burst from its cage.
No more.
Torrential rain blanked the moonless night sky.
Jump, or don't jump?
His voice boomed loudly into the night sky:
“I'm sorry Clara! I love you!”
Then he stumbled!
The night was tempestuous and my emotions were subtle, like the flame upon a torch. They blew out at the same time that my sense of tranquility dispersed, as if the winds had simply come and gone. The shrill scream of a young girl ricocheted off the walls and for a few brief seconds, it was the only sound that I could hear. It was then that the waves of turmoil commenced to crash upon me. It seemed as though every last one of my senses were succumbed to disperse from my reach completely. As everything blurred, I could just barely make out the slam of a door from somewhere alongside me and soon, the only thing that was left in its place was an ominous silence.
She thought about her family, and the neighbors, and the town, and the dogs next door, and everyone and everything she has ever met or seen. As she began to cry harder, she looked out the window at the stores and buildings drifting past, becoming intoxicated suddenly with the view before her. She noticed a young woman at the bus stop, juggling her children on one side of her, shielding them from the bus fumes.
cold, harsh, wintry days, when my brothers and sister and I trudged home from school burdened down by the silence and frigidity of our long trek from the main road, down the hill to our shabby-looking house. More rundown than any of our classmates’ houses. In winter my mother’s riotous flowers would be absent, and the shack stood revealed for what it was. A gray, decaying...
The arrival of winter was well on its way. Colorful leaves had turned to brown and fallen from the branches of the trees. The sky opened to a new brightness with the disappearance of the leaves. As John drove down the country road he was much more aware of all his surroundings. He grew up in this small town and knew he would live there forever. He knew every landmark in this area. This place is where he grew up and experienced many adventures. The new journey of his life was exciting, but then he also had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach of something not right.
I had only to close my eyes to hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by that obliterating strangeness. The feelings of that night were so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand… Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past. (170)
I had gone. . . to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring in the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring (13).
The city seemed less hectic here and a little less crowded. I had read online that the once murder capital of New York City was now the fourth safest neighbourhood behind the upper east and upper west sides. I unlocked the door into the lobby of the apartment, the lobby was small and had one wide stairwell at the back of the room. Aunt Allison's apartment was a third-floor apartment, but the third floor seemed to be less of a trek than I had expected. I hadn't been in this apartment before
His own loneliness, magnified so many million times, made the night air colder. He remembered to what excess, into what traps and nightmares, his loneliness had driven him; and he wondered where such a violent emptiness might drive an entire city. (60)
...nd just as fast the memories came they went. Cringing her teeth, she begins to count. “One, two, three, four, five…” As she is about to reach six she begins to feel a warm rush invade my inner skin, instantly she feels relief. It no longer mattered to her that that woman came, or that the trash was overflowing with weeks of junk mail or that she had a thirty page thesis due tomorrow. All that mattered was getting on the phone and phoning her mother, Nancy. “Mom?” says Janine.
I peered around through the rain, desperately searching for some shelter, I was drowning out here. The trouble was, I wasn’t in the best part of town, and in fact it was more than a little dodgy. I know this is my home turf but even I had to be careful. At least I seemed to be the only one out here on such an awful night. The rain was so powerfully loud I couldn’t hear should anyone try and creep up on me. I also couldn’t see very far with the rain so heavy and of course there were no street lights, they’d been broken long ago. The one place I knew I could safely enter was the church, so I dashed.
So there I was, thundering (or carefully maneuvering) my way up Route 9. After a quick stop at the local police station to re-orient myself (as I missed a left turn), I pulled into the small parking lot of the small, two-story, stucco-and-shingled building with an enormous satellite dish on it. I double-checked my questions, made sure my recorder was working, and headed in. I sat in the small waiting area as the secretary went to fetch Simon. Palms sweaty, I rubbed them on my jeans to calm myself and let out a little nervous energy.
My mum always used to say to me 'give your life to Christ before it's
My feet planted firm on the ground as I bit the inside of my cheeks to feel something. My pigtails and gray uniform forgotten along with my surroundings as I just watched death do his work. I didn’t feel like a kid anymore. The once peaceful scene turned into a mass of chaotic moments as soon as metal clashed on metal, and the remains of glass littered the floor of the street in front of the fenced gates of my school. My peers screamed loudly but the sound of the crash replayed in my head, but worst of all is that I saw the blond hair of the woman cover her face like a veil tainted red. My teacher ushered us to wait inside yet my mind was numb and my thoughts blurred as I heard the cries of the adults.
The sheer white curtains billow in through the open window with the warm night air, like the sails of a ship setting off into the night. Lying in bed, I hear the buzz of a scooter whizzing through the streets, ironically followed by the rhythmic clip-clop of horseshoes meeting the cobblestone streets. It is our last night in Salzburg, Austria, and that moment embodies what makes this city appeal to me so much. Somehow, in the midst of the chaos of the twenty-first century, Salzburg has preserved many remnants of its past while still keeping up with the times in many other ways. Pondering this, I lie in bed unable to fall asleep, as two ribbons of wind flutter through the opposing windows and collide in the center of the room shredding in every direction, and blowing the hair from my face. In the mirror on the wall, the stubborn moonbeams, refusing to go out with the lights, shine and dance as they are reflected onto the wall. I blink slowly, pausing to feel my body sink deep into the down mattress. Every muscle in my body relaxes, leaving me in complete comfort, lying here alone with...
his father’s fantasy! Both, his mother and father had been told what they wanted to hear.