Requiem..

It was late, later than usual.  The road stretched on before him, lit at sporadic intervals by streetlights. Those murky yellow circles which gave the air around him the glow of an exotic despair, the sight of which enthralled and sickened him. He felt tired, exhausted. Tired of the night, tired of the nameless whispers around him, tired of his thoughts that ran wild in strange realms, tired of the perfect world which never cared. He sat by the pavement, head resting on his knees and closed his eyes.

He was walking again. But the road was unfamiliar. He looked around, trying to find some mark of his quotidian routine. Then he saw the boy, hardly out of his first decade of life, tied down in chains, gagged till he choked. He knelt by the child, horror and shock. The child moved, but barely, his body bore marks of his struggle to free himself. And his face, his face seemed oddly familiar, he knew that face from somewhere in his past. He pulled at the chain holding down the child, but it did not yield. It seemed as if they were held in place by the weight of the world itself. He tried to pull out the gag, but the harder he tried, the deeper it stuck inside the kid’s tiny mouth.

He looked at the kid, guilt and dread washing through him. But the child’s eyes did not accuse him, they held no grudge. Then he recognized that face, recognized himself in it. The child was himself, when he was ten years old. His eyes were filled with all those which he had lost over the withering autumn years: hope, faith, his impatience to fall in love, his ability to trust, his appreciation of the beautiful, his treasure trove of dreams. Those eyes, which were his, seemed to be mocking him. Mocking himself at what he had become.

He lay down. And by his side lay all that he was once, gagged by the rag he had thrust down his own mouth, held down by the weight of the perfect world. He closed his eyes, for the darkness of his eyelids was more comforting than that which surrounded him.

“…ashes, ashes…we all fall down…”