Cities of souls

There was, I believe, a time once, when we used to watch the moon or sky, in summer nights, lonely evenings, during scaring storms and starving winters, to see the course of tomorrow, to know that the fruits were ripe and the boars wild. It was not paradise, no, but it had an innocence of a wild but slowly pulsing kind. Not lack of violence, hunger, deceit or death, no, but innocence still.

In our days, I feel, there is a kind of restless spirit, or has been for uncountable years. We need and search something. It is nothing specific; I doubt it exists outside our suppressed and shadowy dreams. It is not the lost innocence. No amount of compassion or blissful ignorance will bring that back. It is something else, a new entity born from desperation and aimlessness. That is the reason we come to the cities. Our quest is for what I call, unable to pinpoint it, the soul of the city. A city of souls where we would have purpose and respite. But our cities are dead and drab. For all their pulse, congestion and 'living the moment' they still resemble only empty husks with carrion crawling about. That is why we fill our days with haste, and work and sense-dulling entertainment – to hide the void inside.

But we are not all grey and dead inside. Sometimes our unease and seeking are rewarded. In the city through café windows, persons disappearing behind the next corner, the early, but leisured buzz of a weekend morning at the station, we catch glimpses of the ever fugitive, dreamed-up, soul of the city.

\\A new attempt at short stories. Thank you to Virginia and my disgust at my ragged everyday life for putting the pen back where it does not belong.