Flames lick the blackened ground a demons hand charring the untouched earth as with snaky finger of charcoal smoke reaching into the sky, grabbing greedily at th the rapidly receding skyline. The building was too old to survive, the city had wanted it destroyed years ago, brought down so new lofts and sky risers could spread out and overtake the last remaints of the areas humble rapidly forgotten history. A wave of new generation drowning the generations of its mother and fathers it origins in a rush to establish the supremacy of their own. Perhaps that is why, the firetrucks have yet to arrive, they are letting the fire takes it course, making sure the job is a job well done indeed.
Looking out the window from the third floor at the mass of fire erupting from the earth as if vomiting up the last vestiges of scandal and secrets the old building held before being brought down completely by it's own fiery consumption. I too have some secrets to expose of, with that I throw not one but two identical black leather bound journals into the growing hungry, cavernous mouth below. Ironically the fire destroying my imprisonment; my detachment from the world, shutting myself inside these four white walls, will be the destruction of my prisoner. Pining my life away upon pages of scrawled thoughts that cannot be shared, conversations that never were, experiences that were recorded but not lived. All this time I was searching for a past, yet I was a phantom in the present; neither sleeping nor eating but searching, always searching. Searching for what cannot be found, for what could a past tell me? I am the man who stands here today, a culmination of thoughts, experiences, emotions, I am that man regardless of memory, that I have always been. In my ruthless search to find out who I was, I lost sight of who I am, who I want to be. I lived too much for the past, and withered away my present destroying shard by shard a life for the future. Just as this fire consumes Thallow Flats, as the separate lives of it's occupants evacuate to mingle on the stairs exiting together out onto the street, pouring forth as one big culmination of lives, experiences, moments, thoughts until the building is brought down and those lives come together collect themselves to rebuild again, to move on, to continue. But those instances, in the raw burn where they shared everything they had going down in flame, that bond can never be destroyed. As the smoke leaks under the doorway, the building creaking as its foundation is slowly ravished as the fire works it way up, I too evacuate to the street below. Down here, in safety among the occupants, I lived among for so long and yet never really met, I, too watch the great building shudder and claim it's last sigh, I too, vow to rebuild, to begin anew, to live—as life goes on.
