The Doves that Strut

23

"Stand-up comedy night at Jacques's Cafe, my friends, just a block away up the street. By only a ten, you're getting to watch the finest comedians in town," a man in a green-and-blue checkered shirt and a pair of beige cargo pants hawks between a hot dog cart and a road sign at the end of the block. He waves a dull orange flyer in the air as high and vigorously as he can, his other arm weighed down by a fat stack of more flyers. His effort seems to be futile, with no one responding to him amidst the rackets of the crowds and vehicles.

It's First Avenue and looks nothing like any other places in the city. Every building here is packed closely to each other like sardines in a can, plated with sizeable screens, that feast on every shopper's glance with advertisements. Opposite the road, I see three girls in bikinis ecstatically splashing water at each other at a beach, a man showing off his watch before a black-and-white filter, a close-up shot of a woman's lips rubbed with glimmering gloss (filmed in black and white as well, of course) and more. Crisscrossing with all the other avenues and streets, First Avenue is a digital maze, and its dazing artificial lights are wardens forbidding you to look up and notice the absence of stars.

Despite First Avenue's proximity to the University of Fragranceport—just a subway station away—here is flocked with citizens and tourists just like any Sundays, which makes it nearly impossible to run without ramming your head into someone, as if they don't care about the city so much as feel fine carrying on with their life.

A quarter past one in the morning, it is, nearly a perfectly fine night downtown.

I ignore the flyer man and step past him. After a double-deck bus has inched its way through the road, I wade across the zebra crossing along with dozens of other pedestrians, and realize that curbs don't exist here as the sidewalk has merged with the road, on the same level. On both ends of the crossing, the traffic lights are also sprayed black, their signals unheard with the cars' engine noises and honks, while a traffic director is gesturing and whistling at the intersection of First Avenue and Trancelaws Street.

Subconsciously, I speed up my pace, into a hustle, plowing through the crowds, my heels ceasing to meet my toes on the concrete at the same time. I rush past Trancelaws Street, a McDonald's, another hot dog cart, an Apple Store, a Japanese restaurant called Ryōri ōchō (they have a waitress dressed in a purple Kimono welcoming customers outside), and more and more shops. I think to myself that Claire has to eventually call me to announce her victory and go like, "Hey, guess who just annihilated an entire team of police-cosplaying scumbags with her intrepidity and ingenious, two-hundred-IQ strategy?" when I've arrived at the destination fate has assigned me. In Greek Mythology, the Moirai—some call them the Sister of Fate—weave each person's destiny into a piece of fabric. Therefore, if I walk just a bit faster, outspeed my fate, and reach my destination earlier, I just might be able to cheat and get to hear from Claire a couple of minutes earlier... which doesn't make any fucking sense at all. What am I thinking?

...

Silly me—having a pipe dream and not realizing my swiftness could have already been sewed to my fabric.

"They keep imagining their glamorous future, perfect drawings that don't exist, overlooking their present, hankering for the time when everything betters and they become happy, following their well-drafted plans without doing things that actually cause changes," I hear her say in my head, her voice buoyed up by a sense of sorrow I can't explain or erase. She is like one of those film characters, gone, but whose voice still remains in the story as the narrator, speaking last words outside the camera until the credit rolls, never appearing, anymore. "And when their future has finally arrived and become their present and nothing's changed, they just move on and imagine their next future."