ACT III of III: Empyrean
Part XIII: Ashland, the City
Episode Three: Five Years Later
(From Look At What You’ve Done)
Do you ever have the feeling that everything makes sense? Like you cracked the code, or that all the puzzle pieces fit? Like you made all the right decisions and the whole world played along to your rhythm? This is my city, my world, my life.
FIVE YEARS LATER
The tracks are gone, covered up by a snow that won’t stop falling – I can’t see where she’s going. There, in the distance; small sparks flicker in the white maw, quick flares against a blinding backdrop. A single blanket made of countless flakes strung together by circumstance and climate, clingy and co-dependent as day turns to night and no one wants to be alone.
Winter is a curious thing for a city, something we don’t control yet try so hard to predict and contain even as it continues to surprise each and every year. There’s always a new way to beat the storm, a clever tip for de-icing the car, maybe an improved road clearing schedule. But in the end, winter wins out because there’s strength behind the wind and snow and fog, a cohesion in the season that makes the cold both bearable and overwhelming at the same time. Winter stops a city in its tracks and forces adaptation even amongst steel mountains, asphalt rivers, and concrete valleys whose silence is swayed when it’s turned a wonderland of snow and ice. But I have to keep searching for this girl because she’s all I can think about.
It doesn’t take much to get things started – the neighborhoods are chatty and often make the first move. All I have to do is reach out and listen; an analogue parking meter to my right, the cracks in the sidewalk under my feet, the power lines sagging between juncture points. There are stories under every rock, tales coursing through every subway tunnel, centuries-old epics hiding behind the modern veneer. This city speaks all the time but no one listens. The snow starts falling harder, an even more impenetrable wall of pale twilight cascading through the buildings into our lives.
The sidewalk sends out a chorus of footsteps, each one another note in the daily serenade for commuters and students within walking distance to their schools. Cracks and stains are everywhere over concrete and brick designs – contemporary vs modernity. The second-to-last cigarette is actually better than the last because the end is near but not so close that you can’t enjoy the smoke for what it is instead of as the addiction you don’t want to admit. A smoke and a sit – got to collect myself and listen instead of assume, hear what’s actually being said and not just what I want.
This junction is a curious thing – both a physical and metaphorical crossroads stretching back centuries. First it was a bridge over troubled water when rivers ran red and banks left to smolder. Then it was the fortress in waiting, a nexus of trade routes thus a target and liability. Next it was left to die, a corpse of an outpost burned and broken on the water’s edge. Fast forward and the river dries up, the ruins are grown over, and men once again build something – this time a house, then another one after that. The earliest days of the city are peppered with doubt and insecurity as they often are, the time when nothing is certain and it could all fall apart in an instant. But still she persisted, and it morphed with the city getting bigger each generation, a metropolis still in its infancy finally blooming into what it should be. Now I stand here, on the corner of the intersection, waiting for the lights to change so the small man can tell me I to cross and keep looking for the girl.
Where is she? I can’t see past my own hands and it’s getting late.
Wait…there.
Past a bookstore of stories within stories and down an alley set ablaze by a leaky gas main more than once, through a neighborhood she’d never seen and into a park so warm and welcoming the snow didn’t stick. The trees were still bare of leaves or snow, skeleton’s hands reaching into an otherwise empty sky. Birds chirp and squirrels dart about because there is no storm here, just a slight breeze and faint traces of snowflake envy, like sepia surrounded by the white maw. On a bench sits the girl, alone and deep in her own thoughts. She cannot see the brilliance within, the energy erupting effortlessly from inside her making this whole place a more perfect day.
She’s special and beautiful…she needs my help. She’s me, I think, just younger – because I can hear what she’s feeling, see what she’s thinking; and she’s terrified. There’s too much passing through her, the energy of ideas too many to count, of theories and people and places and experiences and emotions and perspective. The war in her head rages on, nonstop conflict between what she knew and what’s real. Things fall apart when the center cannot hold, but if hope persists then the center will be known. She doesn’t understand how little she actually understands, how much more there is to see and do.
Doubt is a difficult concept; a necessity for the development of ideas, yet also the flaw in all things. We doubt against what we know to be true, and that skepticism has the potential for unbound greatness or relentless nothing. Understanding doubt helps diminish its power – recognize the value of your doubts and the answers no longer matter.
The everything else isn’t what scares her – she’s been stuck in between wanting to know and fearing what that means. Because the more she wants to know, the more she loses herself in the miasma of the city, the rising and falling tides of human interaction and technological development, the changing landscape we can’t ignore. And that doubt is what keeps her going, the pressure that pushes her one way or the other as seconds expand out over hours and days decompress into months. In her head, she’s frightened and alone, walking home trying to understand why she feels like the entire world is fighting to talk with her. I know what that feels like.
She didn’t hear my words because the fog was still thick between her ears, the smoldering black cloud of existential turmoil she simply couldn’t break even though it bent and twisted and warped beyond what the impossible. The feeling of helplessness had very nearly taken her completely, as though she were sitting on the precipice of a bottomless chasm instead of the bench in a park outside time and space. She hadn’t even realized what she was doing, dragging the past and present and future behind her as the storm in her soul threw relativity out of sync. Everything I knew and loved about the city swirled around me in the crackling chaos; the memories and voices and experiences that I understood so intimately it felt as though I’d always been there, like I lived thousands of lives each as brilliant and beautiful as the one that came before. And as I trudged through the tempest, my boots sliding back with each step, the fire spiraling around her became clearer; a funnel of flames shooting into the sky and reaching out like witch’s fingers across the city as I became more and more real in the corner of her eye.
When I spoke next, she heard the sound of something sweet amongst such dire cacophony, but my words still slipped into the chaos before she could understand. I moved closer still, my hand reached out through the fire and ice and dawn and dusk and years that haven’t yet been so she could see I was there to help. I knew it would get worse before it got better, that her fear would cut through me one thousand times before she accepted what I was trying to say. My hands are swollen and bleeding, rotting and growing and splintering and shimmering, passing through the cosmos wrapped up into this girl’s metaphysical meltdown in a park that doesn’t belong in a corner of the city where no one lives.
The third time I reached out, she heard the words through the maelstrom, the ones I kept repeating like a mantra over and over until they pierced the veil she’d made for herself. Each time she made out another part of each sentence, as though she was deciphering the meaning even though it was obvious. The whole thing felt longer than it should have, stretched out over the years she thought were only days that then came to a head when time caught up. But, she didn’t want to listen because what I had to say meant finding a solution to her indecision, and future uncertainty was her greatest fear of all.
Even as the doubt caused her nothing but pain, she didn’t want to go one way or the other. She’d found a toxic comfort living in between experiences and existing vicariously through humanity as a cracked existential lens. I know she would be content feuding with herself forever into infinity, constantly second-guessing herself and wondering about the possibilities instead of choosing anything because not acting is addictive and cancelling plans at the last-minute feels better than believing she’s not good enough. Because I felt that way all those years ago when the city first spoke to me like it’s trying to speak to her. She’s doing everything she can to not decide.
There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, but she can’t see.
Because I’m not there. I was never a person or even a character, just a concept personified. This is a notion begging for life in an unending tempest. I’m nothing more than a faceless idea in a story that’s not about me. Everything is everything else.
Some people live and die and never leave home, wrapped in their roots so tightly they can’t survive outside the nurturing grasp – like a microcosm of society poured over itself again and again, always in the same place so the feelings never change. What happens when they’re ripped from the ground, when their entire world is laid bare before them and everything else is only a decision away? How do they justify the very existence of the ‘out there’ when the roots have been the everything for their entire lives? And how will they react when home reveals itself to be the empty concept it’s always been?
Some are lost and never find their way, tempted by the possibility of potential and the excitement of what’s new – always traveling so the roots never take hold. How many broken promises does it take for them to show their real selves? What sours optimism past the point of no return? When does freedom chain them more than roots ever could?
The girl was lost on purpose, struggling because she believed that was the meaning of life. She was ready to surrender to herself and make the wrong decision even though that shouldn’t have been possible. The struggle is real in these moments, the final seconds of consciousness as she comes to terms with letting herself down and the idea of me slowly fades into the very storm I hoped to stop.
But time’s running out, repeating instrumentals as she screams and shouts. I wish I’d never left the house; ain’t slept in three days. Popping pills and writing about the life I wish I lived every day. Avoiding looks and stares, trying to dodge these hooks. Keeping who I am safe, nothing overlooked.
Until two hands reached out and separated the clouds down to a slight breeze tickling the back of the girl’s neck, just a slight wind carrying absolution and freedom from the pain and uncertainty.
This isn’t who you are, Ashland.
It’s like I was hearing the words for the first time even though I’d spoken them one thousand times and more.
Choose to be something more.
Two hands – one from him and the other from her – reaching out for fair Ashland the City, sitting on the park bench begging for her sanity in the storm overwhelming her sense of self. Two hands – one for redemption the other for peace – begging sweet Ashland the City to take hold and remember how it felt to speak with her home, to touch history and taste emotions. Two hands from two others just like Ashland the City who would finally decide to become herself and learn what she was meant to be, the decision to learn whatever she could.
NEXT: Ashland, the City (Finale)
THE SUPERFLUOUS 