The Symbologist

Chapter 11

He walks along the city streets in silence, the tap tap of his shoes echoing on the worn, cracked pavement. Not a single light in the city is on, forcing him to rely on the light of the full moon. He had grown up in this part of the city, but it had long since been abandoned, leaving the buildings to slowly crumble and fall. He stares at the ground as he takes each careful step, not wanting to look up at the ruins. His shadow dutifully stares back at him, and he looks back at it, into a seemingly endless abyss. It looks to him as if it is expanding, and that's when he feels a tap on his shoulder.

He freezes as he hears a gun cock behind him. My mother has sent me to die.... His mother's life had been taken from her, and in order to escape reality, she consumed drugs and alcohol, lots of it. She made friends who also did, and her child, who was just a baby at the time, was frightened and didn't understand. All the people the child had gotten to know, almost all of them, had hurt the child, badly. Suddenly, he hears the gun go off and a searing pain rips through his left leg. His legs buckle beneath him and his knees clash with the pavement. But he doesn't scream. All the pieces have come together in his head. He can't show them that he's weak, that they've made him weak.

He hears the gun cock again. Taking a deep breath, he pushes himself off the ground quickly and knocks the gun out of the hands of his attacker, something he learned online awhile ago in fear of his mother. However, it's not his mother that's facing him right now. It's one of his mother's friends. Both dive for the gun and he ends up reaching it before his attacker does. Holding the gun up with shaking fingers, he squeezes her eyes shut and pulls the trigger, hearing a body land on the pavement short after. I had to do it, he tells himself. Refusing to look at the dead body, he turns around and runs, as far away from what happened as possible. He has no idea where he's going, but he eventually ends up outside of the city, at a lake.

The surface of the lake sparkles in the sunlight, bringing out the different hues of blue. It's a beautiful sight that would normally calm him and bring him peace, but today, even the silent beauty of the lake can't calm him, cannot bring him even the slightest bit of peace. When he looks at the lake now, it seems to him that the simple beauty is only there to disguise what lies beneath, just as it is in most things in life. Suddenly, he feels as if he is drowning. He closes his eyes and buries his head in his hands before the taunting accusations made by something so beautiful and innocent can swallow him whole.

That was many, many years ago. A lot of things had changed since then.