“Senseless, like blood on flowers – my benefit..”
The sun was trying to break through the dense clouds that covered the sky above the city like a plastic bag.
I have been lying for the second hour looking at the embankment of the huge city and could not feel it in any way.
First, he smelled absolutely nothing, at all. Not the dust of the earth, not blooming water, not food, not coffee!
Secondly, while the parks and streets were fairly well-kept, everything seemed artificial, like plastic-tasting strawberries in winter. Well, thirdly, he seemed faceless to me somehow, tasteless or something. Like the park and the house of our former president. And a sweep of skyscrapers here, and an attempt at ancient streets, and a multi-level subway with cars, with which he was first launched when he was still bearded.
People lying in sunbeds in clothes along the river, which you can’t enter without a boat, a model family mom dad and two children evenly, all in white socks, on Sunday, sitting on a park bench and chewing the same white ice cream, many different Varians to get their hands on a tricolor flag (probably an advertisement of the country) and the central street of the city with the sky completely covered with multi-colored pigeons of the world gave me a strange feeling. Unnaturalness, tension, tension, shine with which only cheap jewelry shines.
– Did you like the city?
– To be honest, no, – I cringed a little under her judgmental look. – There is no spirit in him, that .. Or he is alien to me.
– And he was never here, – agreed with me from the other side.
But I’m sure I was.
Then, 20 years ago, it seemed different to me. It was a city of fountains and pancakes, it was a city of the most delicious Prague cake that I poured condensed milk over and popped at night so that no one could see. It was a city of museums and carriages, it was a city where I saw the episode of “Wait a minute” – the dance of the swans in the real Bolshoi Theater and all the children who were there at that moment put all the adults who brought us there to shame with their wild laughter. It was a city where McDonald’s was considered a holiday and the tastiest place in the world. A city where for the first time in a store you could walk between the rows and touch everything with your hands. And this city also had a “fence”. Drowning in the juicy green of fruit trees, full-water rivers with a clay bottom, when I stepped into the water and sank to my knees, I was very surprised (I grew up near mountain rivers), and many monasteries.
He let go a little when he fed the ducks a waffle cone from ice cream, burying his face in the grass on the shore of the lake. The grass was real. And the pancake finally smelled of moisture and earth.
And then, later in the evening, when it was completely dark and the greenery plunged into darkness and the University shone in it like an alien palace, “that” city began to appear. That international city which now tries to keep a strict brand of one nationality and it looks as natural as “natural blonde” in a black woman. In the almost black greenery, in the light of the headlights, among the streets near the “bad apartment” that got lost, something was sizzling inside. A living memory that maybe one day it will remind its residents about the past. About friendliness, about sincerity, about another answer to the question: please tell me – no, without even waiting for the actual question, about the fact that it is “grown” and built actually FOR people, and not REGARDLESS of the fact that many things are being destroyed around even someone’s life And maybe I will return here one day and he will meet me alive again, albeit not so bright, but with the expensive platinum shine of someone who knows the value of himself, life, the world, with live, not paper pigeons. Maybe…
“This city is unlike anything else around
A passer-by smiles in less than 5 minutes
Helps a person to believe in miracles
Fountains open directly into the sky”
