The Folly
Created: 2021-12-26 (21:13:56) — Modified: 2025-05-28 (19:46:00)Status: completed
I remembered someone who owned the ruin of a telecommunications tower.
I had known this friend since childhood, when she lived a few streets down from me in our green, overgrown town. For about a year in we had been inseperable, then had drifted into separate circles. We remained friends until we each moved to different cities and lost contact.
Her family, well, her father, had purchased the decommissioned telecommunications tower on the hill just outside of town: a tall, ziggurat shaped spire, ringed with drum-shaped equipment, which could be seen from most places. It had originally been a uniform white, but her father had the notion it should be bright orange, instead. He seemed a lonely figure, given to occasional bursts of inspiration, which inevitably dissipated before they could be fully realised. In this case, he only ever got contractors to paint the lower levels before he gave up, or the funding ran out, and for years afterwards the tower was a blodgy patchwork of white and orange.
But it looked quite pretty in that form. Growing up, I remember barbeques and picnics on the grassy hill. We never went inside, as the tower itself was under permanent renovation. It was to become a museum to telecommunications history, a multistorey function centre, a hotel. What it really became over the years, was an increasingly grimy ruin.
I returned home after years of living on the other side of the country. The tower was still there on its hills. I had forgotten it existed, had in my recollections burnished out this ruin which could be seen from anywhere in town, a constant presence looming behind the rooftops and over the trees.
It looked even more decrepit now. It was covered in layers of scaffolding, either in service of some new renovation, or as a last means of holding the whole decaying thing together. Underneath, its blotchy patchwork paint had faded to stained grey. But the entry way was open, and lit up against the dusky sky.
Inside was the open, ground floor atrium. I remembered this really had been a telecommunications museum, when the government had owned the place. It had been bright and airy and in its centre there had been a detailed scale model of the telecommunications tower itself. Now, the atrium was stripped of all its furnishings and lit with cheap bulbs that put out a hazy yellow light, and flickered intermittently. The lifts were out of order but stairs led to the upper floo of the former museum.
It was a mess up here. The lift doors were open and spewing out cables and bits of machine parts. I became aware of a constant humming sound resonating through the space. There were even fewer working lights up here and the walls, somehow, looked filthier than the outside.
I considered crossing the floor to the viewing platform, where I could look out over my pretty hometown, but then through the far doors that way came a miserably shuffling figure. It did not appear to have noticed me, but it was drawing closer and I had no desire to learn who it was. I crept back down the stairs, then surprised myself by breaking into a panicked rush and fleeing out into the open air.
I stopped halfway down the hillside to catch my breath, and turned to watch the tower from what felt like a safer distance. Night had settled in, and after a short while the lights in the tower began flickering off: first the ones closest to the entrance, then incrementally level, until the last bulbs went off in the top floor windows.
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Tags: @completed @fiction @vignettes
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