Friday, May 1, 2009
hello, old friend.
9:37 PM
unsubmitted essay #157
Can I help you?
You must be new here. I've seen you wandering these streets with those wondering, trusting, accepting eyes; and the big city isn't a good place to be any of those things.
You've got dirt on your face and a palmprint on your coat where a man tried to mug you and from the way you took a step back when I approached you, I know you know. I know you're learning fast. This is a big city and it's every man for himself.
Can I help you?
...You must think I'm crazy or out to get you like the rest of them. I suppose in places like these, it's not every day that a complete stranger walks up and extends their hand to you without trying to get their fingers in your pockets. But there's something about you that I like, yeah, something about you that's screaming "break me I'm fragile" and I love that.
You're vulnerable. You're innocent. You wouldn't last a day in the city and I want to protect you from that.
Maybe it's the way you remind me of me. Of the way I used to be. Of the way everyone here used to be before the city swallowed us whole.
We used to know what love was. We went out at night and the nightclubs were filled with people laughing and throwing up their hands with old friends. (Now the nightclubs have just become seedy watering-holes for lonely animals. Loneliness makes people no better than animals.)
We used to have our own voices. The streets resonated with the sound of our singing and everything harmonized and was beautiful even though we were all singing different melodies. (Now they play piped-in music in the department stores and the entire city's been tuned to a single frequency, because urban warriors find strength in numbers, in statistics, in homogeneity.)
We used to be alive. Everything about this city was once alive. The people lifted their faces to the sky like springflowers and the roads ran like rivers and the buildings sprang from the ground and grew like joyful trees. (Now you could walk the city by evening and mistake it for a ghost town. The flowers don't look you in the eye and the people walk with their heads down and collars turned up. The buildings keep growing taller but that's because we keep building them that way, not because they're alive; they gave up on us and died a long time ago)
Can I help you?
I couldn't help us
couldn't help me
you're my last shot at saving a bit of how this place used to be.
There's got to be some way I can save you; some way short of placing you in a glass globe
suspended high above the city to stop it from getting to you.
You need to be protected.
You're a poster child for everything we've lost along the way.
Can I help you?
We're too far gone to help ourselves
please help us.