TAINTED LOVE ▸ BILLY RUSSO

prologue

Five miles away from Rose's Bakery, in NYC, there was a big white building.

A church used to work there. It would open at 7 am and home dozens of faithful people, ones with no idea of what life was, others with nothing else to believe in if not in God. Something about that place would bring those people some kind of peace they couldn't find elsewhere. Most of the people who would enter those walls were looking for a way out, looking for something to believe, something that would help them and would show them the way.

Decades later, as people moved away from the almost ghost street, the faithful were less and less.

People turned the old holly place into a theater, a place of culture. The hopeless people kept entering the same walls their ancestors did. The same feeling ran through their veins, but they had a different way to shut it down. Instead of looking for something godly, they went looking for art. Something that would unite a group of people and turn them into something bigger than themselves.

The same way it happened with the old church, the same people who entered those walls with nothing but emptiness were now exiting them with no plans to come back.

Time did was it does best and erased that place from people's minds, only leaving back ghosts and old art.

Rose's bakery closed after some years, the houses around the old building were taken down with plans of putting different ones up.

The problem is that the old bricks never came back up. The old houses that once hold someone's life, were now nothing more than a pile of dust and stone on the old and tired ground.

The only building that stayed up, was the one at the end of the street, too heavy to be putten down.

Now the hopeless soul entering those walls was me.