A Story

He sits on a chair in the middle of a house, on top of a hill, writing a story. The first ray of morning sunlight pours in through the windowless openings on the walls.

His story starts off with a very young man, who started a journey hiking, through the hills and the field and the wilderness. It was right before 7:00 a.m. The golden murmurs of finches carried a steady breeze of spring, soft and clear as the trickling stream. His footsteps drifted along, bringing an open heart into the gaping sunlight.

Upon the sharpening of the golden radiance behind the trees, the young man decided that the gait of his life was not to be confined to the humbleness of the wilderness. The flow of the trees subsided, exposing to him a clearance among the wildflowers. Barely did he notice, the stream had now swelled into a restless, turbulent river. The man jogged down the riverbank, pleased to see dainty wooden doors opening to the rising warmth of the sunlight, greeting him with friendly smiles and kind hearts and chorales. He answered them with smiles and gentle nods, but he felt like he couldn’t halt his stride, hoisted by the emerald breeze. He might name this town— Aurèle. He liked this town, he thought. And it now had good name.

His footprints faded and the river lowered itself from the banks. With the sun’s whitening light climbing higher overhead, he had left his youth behind, but there was nothing lamentable about that — He had the eye of a seafarer; hearing the low hum of bulldozers reducing those houses into a flotsam of rubble, he could already see the city reflecting itself from the bottom of his eyes. The fall of those dainty wooden doors provoked no regret. If anything, he felt inside him a rumbling rise of strength. Under his ardent, unrelenting footsteps, giant prisms of glass and steel thrust themselves out of the ground, and it was the first time that, at the prime of the blazing summer sunlight, he felt so small yet so powerful. Millions of wonders awaited him, and he was now capable— to conquer, to devour. He squeezed past the bustling crowd, a confident dexterity in his gait. The same welcoming luminance showered through the crevices in the dust. Under the labyrinth of sky-piercing prisms he leapt, he thrived, and cavorted in the blaze, driven by a streak of mad devotion. Thousands of eyes hovered by, and yet not one rested on him. But there was a single leaf that did. It had fluttered down that one oak tree on the side of a boulevard, brittle, withered, crinkled, with perhaps the last lingering shade of fiery redness. He felt a strange tinge of sadness at the first sign of autumn.

But still, he kept walking. He didn’t know when the river had been cut off— redirected by a dam, perhaps— or else he could have seen, reflected in its weltering waves, the soft golden glaze of the setting sun. It was getting cold. His spine was crooked and his knees trembled, for he was not young anymore; he was an old man now. He suddenly felt it would be nice to sit down, to tuck himself under a blanket, to go home. So he stopped, in the middle of a mishmash of crossroads, and looked back. Through the hustling crowd and the passing traffic, he did not see it. Nobody. With wilted fingers, he grabbed pedestrians in those dapper black suits, —Where is Arly’s house? He begged, pleaded, implored, Arly needs to go home. But his desiccated voice drowned in the endless hovering of those eyes. However far away he was from the town, where everything stopped just for him, it struck him hard. As if for the first time in many years, he began to cry. He staggered sobbing like a child until everything went fading away with the dying sunlight.

Night has fallen when he sees the house, on top of the hill, now dark and decrepit, where the very old man writes the story— Arly is now old and battered, still sitting on the chair, still writing the story. At the end of the story, he looks up from his book and pen, and sees his own face. Through these eyes clouded with murkiness from old age, he looks for the soft golden heart of that very young man. How long has it been since he left the house? A day, a year, a lifetime… it doesn’t matter. Just like how it has never mattered. He holds out his hand and takes Arly’s, and they rose out of the window together to start another journey.