The Beautiful and the Abandoned

Ok, so the unicorn story is just on the threshold of not being corny, but I think it would take a better writer than myself to keep the central allegory from degenerating into total silliness, so I gave up. I decided I'm going to write something different. Something I was thinking about last night. Hopefully it doesn't become silliness:


My hometown is such a melancholy place; a city of empty buildings and long, pedestrian-less streets. It's an old place, for the south, and many of the buildings are over a hundred and fifty years old. I go home every year for Christmas and walk around there a lot, beautifully aimless and alone in the winter darkness, the dry leaves following me in the wind, lightly tracing the path on the pavement behind me. I think about things; anything. Nothing. It doesn't matter.

Some of the shells I sometimes imagine to be bustling businesses. Cafe's, bookstores, restaurants-- a regular bohemian village, where every Saturday morning people are out walking their dogs, stopping into bakeries to eat eclaires, or poking their heads into the local art gallery to see if there is anything new, different, wild, or even just to say Hey, Buzz, how's it going? One building looks like it used to house a theater. I imagine Saturday nights where people could go and watch a community play, then stop into the cafe around the corner for a cappucino afterwards, perhaps sit outside in the square and talk.

On Sunday mornings, when everyone is tucked away snuggly into churches, or, for the more modern, into bed, the downtown is beautifully deserted. All blue skies and brisk, Christmas air, tree-lined streets with old, uninhabited antebellums, and most importantly, silence. The silence is profound. I like to climb on top of some of the shells on mornings like this, perhaps smoke a cigarette, and lay there.

Recently sad attempts have been made to reorganize a downtown community, but the city continues to expand eastward, away from the old center, and out towards ([new, air conditioned, multi-level parking lotted strip malls. The pastures and forests I used to play in when I was younger have been levelled off.]-don't like this; change later if ever in mood.). Whenever there is a big event, people flood the streets down there and swarms back and forth, a chaotic kind of aimlessness. The next mornings are always the worst, especially if the event was on a Saturday. The gutters and sidewalks are strewn with red plastic cups and Subway wrappers.

So I think, as I lay there, high and watching the clouds drift over the tops of my city's empty buildings, Thank God for strip malls.



Hmm... not exactly what I intended, but I like the conflicting views of my city. Maybe work on later...