Vignette: A Young Man After Work

In the deep of time, somewhere, a little town is there. And little people move about, in and out of each others lives, beneath a pale autumn sky. From the East a wind blows, and the trees hiss in grey ambience, and dry leaves tumble over pavement, beneath cars, between passer-by's feet, piling in yards and at the bases of steps. One of these little people is a young man, around not yet for 20 years, and only present recently, as things might be said for the shedding of childhood. He stands on the sidewalk and watches the trees. He's but a sapling himself, skinny and pale, while his betters, hardy oaks, bare the breeze. And the wind seems to blow out of the aether and in and through the hidden fibers of his being, like ghosts passing by in a dream. He then experiences something new to him, a feeling like non-other he has had before. It takes him suddenly and he is transported far away, like he's now standing on the edge of a body of water, far in some forgotten place, where nothing is greatly stirred but is instead gentle, timeless, and lonely - a deep, borderless melancholy. He breathes in deeply, neither resisting nor wanting, and he is filled with the nameless feeling.
A line of cars stops in front of him, waiting for the light to change. He can see the other people through their dark windows and is suddenly uncomfortable, like it had only just occurred to him that something very private was in public view. He sticks his hands into his pockets and shakes off the chill and continues down the sidewalk.
But towards which destination he walks he does not know, for something has been disturbed in him, and the things in his life and normal routine have lost their sense of substance. His home no longer feels like a home, and he is not really sure what it was that had originally drawn him there. That's what one does, isn't it? One goes home after work if they haven't made plans. But now his home is just a place like any other, perhaps even stifling with its grey walls and sharp furniture, a mere box where the wind doesn't blow.
The young man has already turned a corner which was unexpected, and he walks aimlessly down a neighborhood street where tall trees lean over the road and mailboxes are weathered and cars are parked silently alongside the sidewalk. The sky has already deepened in anticipation of dusk. A single star blinks through the sky where it has most begun to turn purple.
Most others in this little town are preoccupied with little dramas in their lives as they race about from place to place and thing to thing. Indeed, this young man's head was filled with very much the same theater until only just a moment ago. But now as he walked in the growing evening, not yet chilled or gloomy, his thoughts are quiet and vaporous, adrift and peculiar, like lightning bugs at twilight, glowing for only a moment before becoming a shadowy speck quickly lost to sight. But even as the sky ever turns more violet, and clouds ever more pale, and little neighborhood sinks into grey silence, he becomes less corporeal. It is as if he were a ghost walking among another's dream and every moment already a memory before he has yet experienced it.
The neighborhood road turns to the north at the end, but to his right a little split rail fence with an opening marks the end of homes and the beginning of a park, if not the end of the town itself and the beginning of everything else. A gravel trail then winds down a dark grassy hill and disappears into the shadow of dense pines broken up by a few red and yellow deciduous types. Without thought nor calling, though the wind blows up the hill from the darkness below, and with a heart much more like a question than an engine, the young man passes through the opening in the fence and down into the shadows.