There is a small town stapled to the edge of every morning. You know the one. Its streets are fluorescent hallways, its houses cubicles with curtains, its anthem a ringtone that never quite resolves. People there live on layaway. A little boredom down, the rest of the week on credit, every heartbeat a payment toward something nobody has ever seen a picture of. You know it well, my dear friends.
It stands at every junction, polite as a bailiff. Insert childhood here, it says, take your numbered stub, and wait for the chime . The chime is scheduled. The chime is coming. Wait for the chime that never comes. And there the children learn to queue before they learn to read; the alphabet begins with someday. They practise the vowels of the endless deferral. O for older. E for elsewhere. U for until.
Press up, it says, as though gravity were but a rumour. The ride starts in year nine and climbs through your exam results, your internship, your quarterly reviews. Behind every closing door a fresh poster: NEXT FLOOR, ACTUAL LIVING. We watch the numbers glow and climb and exhale and climb. Nobody asks where the roof is. Hope fills the shaft like canned air.
Here anticipation is medicine. Anxious? Swallow some hope. Exhausted? Inhale a podcast about your Infinite Potential. But side effects may include nostalgia for events that never happened and a persistent ringing of one day, one day, one day in the inner ear. Patients rarely leave; the follow-up appointment is scheduled for after “everything calms down.”
Admission is free. The opening has been rescheduled for renovations. Behind the velvet rope: a guitar you alwyas meant to learn. An apology, yellowing, on a plinth. In the last case, under glass, a version of you that knows what it is doing. It fits perfectly until you speak. Every exhibit is labelled Soonish or Nearish or New years dayish or orish. The guards say the grand opening is imminent, they say it will all begin properly once everything calms down. Their eyes are decades tired. You wait in the gift shop fiddling the memories of warmer days.
Every town has one, though the council seemingly denies it. A man sits on the slats with his pockets full of conditionals, the woulds, the coulds, the shoulds, the once-I-haves, the just-as-soon-ases. Beyond the doorway, something warm. Maybe courage. Maybe mud. Maybe only unscripted air. He does not move, he is calculating the precise hour at which risk will stop being risky. He has been at it for some time. He has not noticed that the door has stood open the whole while, or that nobody, not once, in all these years, has asked him for a ticket. Kafka would be proud.
Sadness here is not a thunderclap. It is a but low-voltage hum, the noise strip lights make in a room nobody thinks to leave. We learn to harmonise with it. We call it ambition. Prudence. Being sensible. But stand still, still enough that the world loses your scent, and there is another frequency in the building. A ragged little melody coming through the drywall. It has been playing the whole time. The whole time. That is the part I find hard.
*****
So far, a fable. A faboulous fable. A fable so far. So far the fables. Away so far, the fable. Fables are a kind of shelter.
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