I carry bricks and tile with me in my pockets whenever I go to the city. At least it seems so. Every time I return to my hometown I find an old house torn down – every time I go to the city I find a new one erected.
It feels oddly like a curse – as if I draw life with me, and subsequently cause decay in my home whenever I go somewhere else. And it is perhaps an apt metaphor. I do work in the city. I do live there. I do spend my money there and pay my taxes there, even though the city is an ungrateful host that cares nothing for me whereas my hometown would have known to appreciate my effort. It’s just that… I can’t find work in my hometown. Or on the entire island for the matter. The further you get from the city, the less need there is for programmers – and it’s impossible to make a living based on writing, however much I would have liked to do so.

TALES OF TORN-DOWN BUILDINGS:

1) The townhouses at the corner. Red brick houses, black window frames. Not very tall. They are foggy in my memory it being such a long time since they disappeared. The reason for tearing them down allegedly being to avoid enticing more foreigners to move to town in order to find cheap accommodation. For that reason they left an open, empty field in the middle of everything, at a once busy intersection.

2) My elementary school. It was closed a year after I finished ninth grade. Yeah, it was a small school, but that wasn’t why it was closed. That was just to save money. As if money has any real value besides what you choose to spend it on – and the people in charge tend to only spend on meaningless things rather than anything to improve people’s health and general living standards or the environment… Anything at all that matters in the long run, essentially.
They tore it down. I was there, it was there. I went away, came back and it was gone. I had spent every day for ten years inside those buildings. I knew them better than any other place in the world – and now they are no more.
The first painting I ever made was on the side of one of those buildings. It was made by my grade in unison to welcome a new principal back when we started fourth grade. It was a huge fish tank. I painted a perch. A beautifully coloured perch. Nobody even bothered taking down the painting before they knocked down the wall. It was destroyed. We weren’t even asked if we wanted to keep it.
There went my belief that anything I do matters, and that anything I can create would last. Future gone.

3) All the houses next to my elementary school. Allegedly due to black mold. Remains: a vast empty plain where the town used to be.

4) One of the houses across from my elementary school. And in the near future probably another one close by as well. That one has not been inhabited for a far back as I can recall, and thick cracks in the walls seem to warn of impending doom. Nobody does anything about it.

My point is simply that when I was a child, this was a bustling street. There was a school, there were houses on the other side of the road, and there were houses next to the school that was used as offices or for special ed classes – and down at the corner we had bustling townhouses. Now we have a large empty field. And on the other side of the road; bricks and ruins.

My hometown visibly shrinks. The city I moved to however… It leeches off of me. It sucks everything out of me that it possibly can. I feel drained. I feel numb. But when I attempt to escape to my home, another little piece has disappeared from it. And when I return, the city has been strengthened and expands a little bit more.
When I moved there, there was an empty space next to the station and a large abandoned construction site nearby. Now there’s four or five high-rises and they are in the process of constructing a new shopping mall. The harbour has been invaded by building sites as well, people are being charged an extortionate rate for being allowed to live near some body of water, as if that could take away the stress of still being subjected to the city.
The city consumes everyone within it, and everything around it. Ever greedy, it knows nothing but expansion.

It says something seriously bleak about society that we are forced to deposit our money in a place we care nothing for and which cares nothing for us, whereas everything that does matter to us quietly crumbles in the background.

The city feeds off of me so that I have nothing to give my hometown – and it in turn has nothing left to offer me. We can simply stare at each other, saddened, in silence, and muse at the past that is lost to us.

I have been made a herald of destruction – like Orpheus who was charged with not looking back at Eurydice. But he did, and she stayed in the underworld. I look back, and see a bite taken out of the one place I love and feel grounds me in this world. Not that anything would change if I were to stop looking – it pains me to see it happen, but it would also pain me not to see.

My roots are being taken from me. My past is being denied me. The world doesn’t feel like a place fit for living any longer. If ever it was.
At least other people have a home to return to. Where am I going to go when there is nothing left of my home? Fray and disappear? Turn to dust? I wish I could, so that I wouldn’t have to face the past that is lost or the future that increasingly seems not worth living in. Yet still I remain.

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