Dark gray clouds above me drifted apart. A glow of orange light peered out of the gap that formed between them. It struck the front face of a tall skyscraper I stood under.
The building seemed to touch the sky. It towered over me and any other structure I had ever seen or thought of. The giant, made of concrete and steel and clothed with large sheets of glass, stood in the midst of a forest of neon signs, flashy advertisements and massive screens made of thousands of tiny lights. People walked about with paper cups in their hands. The honking of cars and buses drowned the voices of stock brokers yelling at their phones, company employees chatting and young teenagers loudly speaking of the latest pop songs. I felt overwhelmed.
I stopped to think of how all this was new to me. I saw hundreds of people dart by, I saw buskers play their guitar tunes to the the crowd of uninterested men and women. How was I any different? How was I special? I was nothing but a pink blob of flesh that mattered as much as a grain of sand in a desert. The chaos of the teeming city intimidated me. No one had any time to walk slower, get off their phones and enjoy the view. I felt lonely. In the small town that I came from, everyone who I met on the streets stopped and said “hello” or asked me about my day. We all knew each other and the ones most isolated still had half of us shocked when they left. What made a city so different?
A man bumped into me violently and bolted off. I was hurt. I wasn’t hurt by the physical pain but the failure of the man to acknowledge what he did or apologise for it. I felt unimportant. I hadn’t gone past a few hours in this urban area and I already missed home. I thought of my parents, and how they warned me about the harsh realities of my dreams of city life. By this time the man had left my sight. I hadn’t caught a glance of his face bit I imagined of it as evil, demon-like appearance with a crooked smile and red pupils.
A wind blew at me. The dusty air entered my lungs. I coughed. Several people walked ahead of me and people behind me avoided me like a rock in the middle of a fast flowing stream down a mountain, slowly wearing down over years to a smooth shape to be carried off by the water in the end and join it in its flow down to the sea. City life didn’t suit me.
