Cold as the winter was his breath, fading and vaporizing the moment you touched it. The day had begun to bleed into the night, making the sky unfathomably grey. Trudging along the rusted iron of the rails, he could see the faintest glow of the sun. Immodest stars still adorned the sky as he remembered the painted windows by the river, his neighbour calling out his name from the house beside the breadfruit trees, the granular sweets they served, hot summer nights and a sky full of stars, the wet sharp grass cutting his feet gently as he ran to dive, to fall really into the detergent tainted abyss of water.
Water, that was what he longed for… in some ways more than he longed for the faces that he'd almost forgotten, the eyes that would unconditionally leak at the mere sight of him. It's strangely narcissistic how we can find solace and certainty in the tears of the ones who love us.
Was narcissism what he defined as love? The thought haunted him more than the unreliable collapsing of his feet so close to the place he liked to think of as home. Even when he never truly felt he belonged here, he was certain that he would fit nowhere but here.
Here, the place that mysteriously and exhaustively turned back time the moment he touched its grounds, the place that called out to him like an unsupervised child searching for its mother.
Here was the place he wished to see, but scorned to be. The decaying red letters painted on chipped wood was better than any sight he'd seen before. Even more so then the city lights that prophesied “a better future” that first night he left from home. As his eyes swelled up with unconditional tears that he had held back for so long, he was certain that love was more than narcissistic. Love was longing in disguise.
Taking off the straps that cut into his shoulders the whole night, he fell to meet the grounds a little more bracingly as he leaned on the sign, welcoming him back to where he belonged.
He did belong, but not to the place, to nostalgia and regret at denying small pleasures that embody this place.
Zareef Daian is an aspiring creative writer. Daian is a resident of Uttara, Dhaka. He is currently enrolled in the 10th grade at Rajuk Uttara Model College. Among his notables are the Australian Writer's Centre long listed flash fiction, “A vignette from the sapphire room” and the “Smash The Patriarchy” video series for which he received the winning prize.