The Wee Hours of the City - Part 2

In Part One, https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/chinenye-mbauzoukwu-consultant_i-was-thinking-as-the-train-trundled-through-activity-7104895363550969858-D2hC , I reflected on the waking hours of the city and came away with mixed feelings, most unsettling enough to know there was more to say. Here it is.

The city knows us by name. Like every good landlord, it fills in our details in a dog-eared book whose pages ensure we aren't forgotten by Time. She was here. And there. And so was he, near or maybe even there. Our hearts and minds are mostly serving time too, convicts of our conviction that life is a race in which whoever wins makes all else losers. We know this least of all from furtive glances thrown by passersby to prick our consciousness then dart away as if to avoid being locked into conversations offered but finished before they're started; books with half-filled pages and yet an ending.

The city is a window itself made up of windows. Windows frame our aspirations, walls encase them. In the city, our aspirations simply succumb - cars and offices are the shells we carry around with us, and their windows the opening through which we thrust our heads or cast our eyes to escape albeit temporarily the encasements. Wandering in and out of windows, we see ourselves, mannequins of couture, gourmet, markets and street algos, working to stiffen in perfect poise to belie the turmoil within. Caught in a paradox, we are creatures of effulgent passion trying to frame ourselves in recognizable poses. The city reminds us though that mannequins do not laugh, frown, cry, or even smile. It insists we stay in perpetual motion, one thing after the next and when there is no next, Failure stands arms akimbo in surrender to oblivion while Success transfigures to a street sign, a plaque on a building or wrought iron gate.

'E pluribus unum' declares the gates of one out of many. Millions make the pilgrimage to the city, bringing the burdens they think left behind but now have to ask the city to hold for a while. The city wearied and wary knows a while becomes forever yet cannot say 'No' because its own story is a tattered quilt of threads of the many from which one has emerged. The city has hidden portals that open to the initiated and favoured, the Ones. Sometimes hidden by high fences, other times just a door guarded by denizens clinging in desperate service to the skirts of the Ones. Above the scurrying streets, or on the other side of the portals, the Ones weave the new stories of the city perpetuating the myths that sustain the pilgrimage of the unfavored ensuring the energy source is replenished for the detritivores cloaked in purple and gold.

For some, the city is a promise kept; for most, it is a field of buried dreams. As though triumphant, the city keeps its dead beneath little plinths organized like a proper neighbourhood, a landscape of gray mini buildings separated by green grass and the occasional splash of flowers to mark a heart not forgotten. There are no elegies in the city graveyard, just a greying sadness overwhelming the fading marble busts with vacant stares.

You can smell it, success or failure, and so can butterflies. The astonishing beauty of a flower's petals that jealously guard the receptacle for its nectar are just one of the many ways that Nature marks the special places where the magic of Tomorrow begins. Even if the petals mimic ' home', butterflies can smell the lie from far away. Maybe that's why the city has no butterflies, no magical places where Creation calls home, only often grotesque structures cloaked with cladding, or bathroom tiles when either pedigree or money, sometimes both, have lost their way.

We have broken up and I don't know how to reconcile with my city, my home. One of us doesn't belong here it seems.