Have you, maybe, ever, had a very bad day? A day where you honestly had to make ... no, wait, let's try that again.
There is a point, come in every person’s life, where one has to make a choice…
… well, no. That’s wrong. There are a million points, in every one of a billion, billion lives, where a choice has to be made. At that point, chaos spirals outwards and forms new crystallized order. Some choices are minor, like whether you have oatmeal or doughnuts for breakfast. Other choices became something much more, like whether you turn right or left at an intersection -- and, by that choice, hit a vagrant who’ll might just be the savior of worlds. Lives become parts of stories, which are told time and time again, oftentimes by breathless voices relating the story of how their aunt crushed the vicious Spider God…
Honestly, the Spider God story sounds a lot better to me than the start of my own little tale. Sure, I was the hero of my own host of stories. The time I recovered a hard drive from the pits of despair. The time the Princess Nocturne was brought back from the verge of death, by acquiring a new heart at the local computer store -- no, I’m sorry, a new CPU and fan at the Castle of Demise… ehh. All the rest… meh, you don’t need to hear about those. My life really wasn’t all that interesting. C- at best, the sort of a grade which would get you hearing from your parents about how much of a disappointment you were.
In a way, I buried myself in small projects while living paycheque to paycheque, small projects which - to my excitement - were in vogue around the town in which I now lived. Tiny social interest pieces, taken by camera and a knack for interest writing, worked their way into larger ones, and before long, I had acquired a following of sorts - one which led to a certain dialogue, an entry chip into larger games...
A camera, a bus pass, and a pair of feet could carry an aspiring entrepreneur across town, and an art department in the local university had a suitably interesting focus: in an attempt to highlight the increasing gentrification of this university town, they had a sizeable curiosity viz. a certain project or two, ones which might result in the reduction of certain interesting facets of my hometown.
To define my early days would be an exercise in disappointment. To describe my middle years, an exercise in frustration. To describe my latter years, an exercise in loathing - and, perhaps, in that, my curiosity began to burgeon… and that turned out well. Alrighty, though. So let’s skip ahead to my last day on Earth.
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*click*
“Alright. Now, that looks pretty good. Excellent colour, strong message. Very Dark Souls.” To myself, I snickered a tad - some gentleperson had painstakingly graffiti’d a message on the wall, with an arrow downwards, reading, simply, ‘Mind The Gap’. The fact that it was written in exquisite calligraphy wasn’t the best part: it was the four-foot hole surrounding the wall on which the message was written. Someone wanted to show off, and they did so well.
Click went the camera as I took another shot, from a second angle; I wanted to show off how the sun highlighted the artist’s work, and I was decidedly cautious in my efforts to see how far down that hole went, without getting anywhere near it myself. Somehow, a huge part of the floor had collapsed, and I momentarily cursed, thinking how that creator might have created that hole in the floor after writing the message. Still, it was a suitably comic message anyway, and fit the message of the piece: that removing all of this effort, this history, without suitable documentation would be one ginormous crime, a blasphemy in a whole host of ways..
“You know,” I smiled as I began my trek back, “you haven’t said a word or two yet, Forte. You wanna say something? Maybe even ‘what’?” Nothing greeted my ears, and I chuckled once again: “Closed-mouthed jerk.” Forte was nothing more than a tablet computer, one I’d had for a few months - and while not a camera, he was as much of a ‘constant companion’ as my other equipment, even more so. I never expected him to respond, though from time to time, I’ve wondered if, one of these days, he actually would. After all, who doesn’t expect their toys to talk back?
“Alright, let’s retrace,” I yawned, yanking a post-it note off a wall as I passed by. Big part of this process: while taking pictures of urban decay may be legal and reasonable -- you can’t exactly do much with a picture of a building which will be yanked down in short order -- actually entering such a building is a matter of trespassing unless you have actual permission from the owners, and very few building managers are willing to allow for documentation on how ill-kept their buildings are. This, if nothing else, is why you don’t make chalk marks on the walls, you wear regular-patterned shoes, and you have gloves. Oh, and you number your notes.
Those aren’t the ONLY reasons, of course. Nor are those the only precautions you take, as I’m about to demonstrate.
Six sticky-notes later, and I was beginning to mumble to myself. One of the various issues you encounter while performing a work of urban treachery and trespassing is that you can get tired after climbing up to the interesting stuff. Also, there’s the sound. Where one building is marked to come down, so are others. And so, the pounding of the jackhammers, the grind of the drills, the honking of the horns, those all become a major deterrent, because they will put you right. to. sleep.
You folks over in the rural areas might not get this one. Here’s why. In rural areas, silence is the norm. Heck, in non-central city areas, silence is the norm. For those of us near the middle of a city, the sound of construction isn’t just a constant, grating noise, it’s a lullaby to lure us to sleep. It tells us that everyone’s awake around us. It’s normal. And so you can see why, tired as I was, I nearly slipped off the edge of the building.
Ten milliseconds later, I was awake, alert, and ready for absolutely no coffee. There’s nothing like a momentary dip into microsleep to wake a girl up, and let me tell you, that was more than enough. I found myself clutching a small concrete pillar which had, hitherto, been resting behind me, a perfectly harmless pillar, the solidarity of which was continually reassuring.
Okay. This was just me saying these things to myself. I will not fall asleep again. I will not even begin to sleepwalk. Because if I do again, I will die. Perfectly sensible, and reasonable, and sane, self. Why, thank you. You’re most welcome.
After collecting myself, I detached myself from the very friendly pillar, and began to return to the entrance of the building. While I’d like to say that this process was inextricably long, and exceedingly dangerous, the simple fact of the matter was that … well, it was just me returning from my point in the building to the entrance I’d taken, collecting all of the sticky-notes I’d placed upon the walls on my way in.
With a sigh of relief, I exited the … well, non-existent double-doors of the newly-designated Heritoc Building, a creation which would replace a historical monument which… which… I couldn’t really find it in me to care about. I closed my eyes. It was important, somehow. And now, with a full camera of photos,
I could step into a dangling power line.
shit.