In this part of the city, if you stood still, there was no sign of life. The people had punched out from work and returned to their houses. The animals....had punched out from work and returned to their houses.
And nothing moved. I could be the only person in the entire world.
Look up at the stars and I’m gone.
And maybe there were people inside the concrete boxes that surrounded me, maybe there were people on the other side of the world, experiencing beautiful sunrises and heart-breaking sunsets simultaneously. Maybe life flourished all around me, maybe it was me and my ungrateful mind that didn’t want to see it. Maybe I was lucky to be in amongst this gathering of life.
But probably I wasn’t.
For half an hour I walked as the only man to have ever walked. I breathed air that no one else had. For half an hour, I was life.
But then I experienced, in less than a second, the destruction of a world, the intrusion and interruption of perfection; the power of mankind.
Two men stepped from the shadows, or should I say, stepped into the light. The shadows are everywhere in the city, in city life.
As they beat me into submission I fell. But I had not been corrected, this city held the living, but it did not hold life.
The leather chair smelt of... leather. And the flowers... didn’t smell. Not from this far. My psychologist wore a shirt, a plain shirt with a blue tie.
No, a green one. He held a clipboard with important information attached to it. Or was it just old games of tic-tac-toe, doodles to pass the time of my insufferable confessions.
The truth was; I didn’t know. The liberating truth was; I didn’t need to know.
But still, I hated myself for trying to retell the details in Stephen-king-novel intricacy.
I hate that my mind is running like a book, like their books.
I hated myself for not realising earlier that the smell of the flowers doesn’t matter.
Least of all, I hate that I don’t remember the colour of his tie.
“So, Marty. After the mugging, how did you feel?” asked my psychologist, I could tell you that his glasses shook, as he spoke, barely staying on his nose. But I would be lying, you wouldn’t read it and it wouldn’t matter. For what you need to know, for what I want you to know, his glasses do not exist. Neither does the chair or the flowers or the room.
But you can choose.
“How did I feel? I felt... can I smoke in here?” I pulled a cigarette from my pocket.
“You can do what you like in this room, Marty. Yes, you can smoke”
I put the cigarette back into my pocket.
“I felt like... a flower.”
“A flower?”
“No, a leather chair” the words hung in the room, figuratively, of course.
“How did you feel like a leather chair?”
“Does a leather chair hold much meaning?”
“It could, Marty. It could mean a lot.”
“Have you ever wanted to be hurt?”
“Why do you say that?”
The room was small, blue, black , large, red, quiet, yellow, loud. And I liked it that way, it had never been like this before.
I walked out of the room walking steadily, shakily, heavily, lightly towards the door.
“Marty, you still have half an hour.”
An hour. A year. A minute.
When I was outside I met a woman. Just outside. Only a woman.
Just and only, nothing had been just and only before.
“We’re outside” I said
“And I’m Sophie” she said
And that was true. She wasn’t Mary and she wasn’t Jane.
She was Sophie.
She was life.
Note from the Author:
The paragraphs are incorrect, I know. I have started a new line when I didn't need to quite alot.
I could change it but that would go against the entire concept of the story.
...
