My Mind

I look around to see a crowded city, moving fast. The faces blur together and I can’t make out one person from another. The shops around are completely absent of people, filled with a very small amount of items, and only one person ‘working’ in every one. The food places around consist of only small coffee shops and delis, all also completely absent of people.
I feel an urge to step forward and join the fast-moving crowd. I slowly pick up my foot and place it on the concrete.
Everything stops.
I look around, confused, and see only a few people still moving about, very slowly now. The remainder of the people are statue-still, stuck in one pose. I look at the unmoving curiously, wondering what it was that they were hurrying so quickly to get to. Each face is a replica of the other: stern and emotionless, as if nothing could faze them.
Turning my gaze away from the unmoving, I examine the ones meandering around uselessly now. An older man whistles and flips his car keys absentmindedly. I looks as if he’s losing his hair and his shape now; A boy around six or seven jumps rope in front of a coffee shop singing Yankee Doodle and giggling whenever he trips or loses his balance; A teenager walks back and forth in front of a separate coffee shop, debating on whether to go in or not. He pulls a cigarette from his back pocket and lights it, coughing before it even reaches his mouth. The last person moving is a woman in her late twenties, crying in front of a clothes store and muttering to herself about how stupid she was that she trusted him, her faith in both men and humanity slowly drifting away; she seems so sad.
I walk up to the man first and examine him. His hair is grey, along with his eyes, which only contain a sprinkle of what used to be blue. He stops whistling and looks down, as if straight through me. He can’t see me.
I tear my curious gaze away from him and begin walking toward the little boy. He looks up at me and begins to giggle. I can’t help but smile back, his innocence flooding me with light. But the shadow starts to consume all traces of the light inside me, forcing all thoughts back into darkness. I struggle with it, trying to keep my thought process on the little giggling boy who pays no attention to my obvious discontent.
I stumble up to the teenager, trying to clear my head. The smoke from his cigarette fills my throat and I begin to cough. The teenager looks straight at me, his eyes such a dark brown that they look like black. I study them carefully, completely sure that I see a tint of red inside of them that seems to be slowly growing darker. He stares at me curiously, then mischievously, the red taking over his brownish black eyes. Removing the cigarette from his mouth with his two fingers, he gives me a sly smile. I back up, uncomfortable; something is building inside him that seems to be taking control of all his own actions. I’m drawn to temptation and stop moving backward, allowing him a few steps toward me; the same feeling that seems to be overtaking him is now about to overtake me. I pry my eyes away and run toward the crying woman, trying to ignore the empty feeling in my heart.
I heave a sigh as I look over the woman crying, still mumbling, now incoherently. She has dark brown, long straight hair and she’s wearing a bright red dress. The make-up she had on is now running all down her face, but she is somehow still rather attractive. I try to think of something to say, something to comfort her, but everything I think of sounds wrong. I can’t help but to begin to feel a pang in my heart for her suffering. How alone must it feel when all your trust has disappeared? How are you supposed to fix something that already happened? She whimpers and looks over to me, and in her eyes I can tell she’s losing it all; they’re beginning to turn black and emotionless. I lift my arm up a fraction and she shakes her head. It was my fault in the first place, she murmurs to me, her tears drying up. Nothing can change that. She stares at her cell phone absentmindedly and walks straight into the store, not looking back.
I begin to cry, not knowing why. I look back around at the people who move without a care. The man is still whistling; the little boy is still jumping rope; and the teenager still paces back and forth, smoking on his cigarette. Whether I would have walked up or not, they would still be doing the same thing. The transparency, the darkness, the temptation, the sorrow.
I stand still and the statute-like people begin to move again. And I can’t make out heads or tails of who is who, nor can I even see the few people meandering slowly in front of stores. It’s as if nothing had changed.