I

The past is an abandoned railway cut into the outskirts of the city. The tracks, two rusted scars, are still there, but the trains no longer run on them. I walk them slowly, carefully, as if afraid of slipping into time. The rubble creaks underfoot, and the old wooden sleepers, rotted and blackened, lie among the luxuriant weeds. It is those weeds, those wild flowers, persistently climbing through the rotten wood, that are the real memory - not the event itself, but what covered it.

I have one perfectly polished memory in my head. A summer day, so clear that even the eyes hurt. Your laugh bouncing off the pine trunks. Everything is so vivid, so real, like a film I can play whenever I want. I feel that warmth, that lightness of carelessness. This is my safe place, my fortress, built from what was.

I stop. I run my fingers over the rusted, moss-covered metal of the signal pole. An orange, velvety dust remains on the skin. I look at them.

What a talented forger I am. What a master landscape painter, painting on a rotten canvas.

After all, there was never such a laugh. And the day was not so sunny. And maybe we were standing in a completely different place. Those sleepers - the facts - have long since crumbled, but the weeds - the feeling, the longing, the imagination - have joined them into a lush, living carpet that is now so pleasant to walk on.

I shook the rust off my fingers. They fall to the ground like dead spices. I look at the path in front of me. Without those weeds, without this sweet lie, everything would have crumbled to dust long ago. Sometimes beauty is just the glue that holds together what should have been broken a long time ago.

II

The heat, sticky and heavy, has been holding the city hostage for the third day, turning the asphalt soft and the air into syrup difficult to inhale. I'm sitting on the floor in an apartment where the silence is so thick I can hear the hum of the refrigerator and my own blood in my ears. Every thing - the book you left on the table, the folded corner of it - is a silent rebuke. No, not a reproach. A small, hot stone that I have to swallow, but it gets stuck in my throat.

Love should be something else. Not this ingrown scar that doesn't itch, but swims from the inside, pulsing with heat. I remember your fingers, always cool, running down the back of my neck, and that memory now is like touching a hot stove. Contrast that burns. I want to hate you for that coolness, for the fact that it's gone now, for leaving me alone in this viscous soup of the day. Anger rises slowly, lazily, like a bubble in boiling tar.

There is a glass of water on the windowsill, left since morning. Now it is lukewarm, warmed by the sun. I take it, I sip it. The water tastes metallic, like licking an old key.

your key

I put the glass back. So hard that she slips. The sound cuts through the silence like the stab of a knife.

And then I stand up. Approaching the window, I open it with a sudden movement.

I breathe in.

III

The future is not a freeway hurtling into the horizon, but a shopping mall that has slowly sprung up overnight in the middle of the fields. Standing blindingly white, windowless, its ventilation shafts hum monotonously like artificial lungs pumping conditioned, odorless air into the still empty halls. I'm standing on the other side of the road, on an island of old asphalt, and I feel like the last local watching the colonizer ship.

In my head is not fear, but a strange, annoying fatigue, as if I had filled out an endless questionnaire all night. All the boxes have already been checked, all the options have been considered, and now I just have to wait for confirmation that my residence application has been accepted into the system. No intrigue. No secret. Just a procedure. The sky above the shopping center is like a faded screen that will soon read: "Please wait. Your future is being processed."

Suddenly, a gust of wind flips open an old newspaper lying at your feet, a moment long enough to read yesterday's headline about future economic forecasts. I can think of if this type of information has ever been useful to me. I can't think of it.

I look at that white wall, at that humming, soulless box, and I realize that it is not afraid of me. She can't even see me. I'm just a temporary anomaly in her sterile field of vision, a brief glitch that will be fixed immediately by the arriving service staff.

And maybe - and this thought washes away the fatigue like cold water - maybe I am that staff? Arriving early, with no tools and no instructions, standing on the other side of the road and naively waiting to be allowed to start work.

Then how did I get here? And is it voluntarily?