The Former City
Created: 2022-12-26 (21:07:08) — Modified: 2025-06-16 (19:41:30)Status: completed
I was walking with a former friend along a mountain highway. It looked across a wide landscape of towers, industrial stacks and tenements, crossed with transmission lines passing across the areas of forest they had not yet cut back. The sky was heavy and humid. It was thick grey like a sheet of lead.
When I had lived here the mountainside had been covered in forest. Below the woodlands and plains had stretched undeveloped to the horizon. Now as the city had grown, the road had crossed over and the industrial estates were seeping in.
My friend opened a hatch by the side of the road. A maintenance tunnel, only it descended far deeper into the ground and when it finally reached the bottom opened into a vast chamber. We were on a street corner in the former city, the version I had grown up in and knew even now probably more completely and intimately than anything else in this world, Buried now deep underground by time yet still full of light and people.
The weather was as humid as the world above. Cars cruising up and down the street in the lazy summer way. We passed through crowds of people who regarded us with pleasant indifference.
Endmatter
Tags: @completed @dream-diary
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