The Path

It was a calm, empty morning. She’d woken up at six o clock just before anyone else. Everything had been silent. From the windowless room where she slept, she’d walked right through the kitchen. This morning, like every other morning, she’d walked up to the window hoping to catch a glimpse of the sun on the dirty brown bricks of the internal courtyard. Usually, she’d see an overcast day, the grey flat clouds making the morning look almost indistinguishable from a late afternoon. But today something had been different. 

During the night snow had fallen onto the city, smooth and gentle, and had covered the courtyard with a beautiful mantle of white to mark the first day of the New Year. She’d been surprised to see it: snow made everything look a bit more beautiful; it covered what was imperfect and it made it pure. In the few months she’d been here she hadn’t seen anything but rain. And now this.

She’d been staring at the window for a while when it had occurred to her to go for a walk before anybody woke up. It didn’t take long to get out of the house. The sun hadn’t even had time to appear over the grey rows of buildings and she’d walked out on to the street, heading for the main road onto the river path to Dean’s village. She often went there because although it was right in the middle of the city, it was the only place silent enough to remind her of the ancient origins of its buildings.  She’d always felt soothed by old buildings and peaceful surroundings. It was because she’d grown up in the country, where at night nothing disturbed the stillness of her sleep and she could actually hear the sound of silence. Since she’d moved everything had changed and when she felt she wanted some peace she tried to find places that were as much as possible noise free.

Today, even more than any other day, she sought that peaceful peace. Unlike any other time of the year, everyone was still asleep. There were only one or two joggers out on the street who had perhaps spent the previous night alone like her and had woken up long before anyone else. The shops were closed, the cars few. No buses. No trains. Princess street was as empty as it must have been when it had first been built and compared to the place it was the rest of the year- crowded, full of big chains of clothing shops and an infinite coming and going of busy people-it was unbelievably silent. 

Everybody had been out partying just the night before to celebrate the end of the year. The noise and confusion had reached levels that would only be matched in a year’s time. By midnight everybody who could, had been out in the main street- as tradition wanted- completely drunk. There had been plenty of shouting, pushing, singing and laughing. But she hadn’t been able to celebrate with them. Surrounded by a crowd of strangers she had felt strangely isolated. It had been like a show: something to watch from a distance. Often people’s lives looked like pantomimes: something she would experience as if deaf. The plot could only be understood by observing the subtle shifts across the actors' faces. It was lonely, and it was strange. But it was natural. It felt like the destiny of one who stood on the outside looking in. 

She remembered that night thinking about all the people hardly anyone paid attention to during times of celebration: those who drove buses, taxis, or the underground while everyone else went out to have fun together;  those who had to clean the streets, those who worked at petrol stations, those who were friendless and for whom the night would be the most lonesome of the year; and what about those who could not afford to go anywhere, those who mourned for the loss of a loved one or those who laid in a hospital ward or who lay sick in the hallways? And then, of course, there were the nurses, the night watchers, the pub workers and most of all, of course, the homeless… 

Her social conscience would not allow her to overlook such outcasts: this inconvenient mass of people who were cut off from all that the others enjoyed and who seemed to be living outside the times; just like the miserable people of any age nobody wanted to know them: they were of no importance perhaps because of their incapacity to make history.

In her short life, she had never identified with “normal” society and this had led her to become aware of the invisible divide between those who seemed to be on the inside circle and the rest.Didn't anyone else notice it? If you didn’t it was probably because you somehow fit in or perhaps because it was easier not to think about it... 
Having always felt like a foreigner even within her own culture it came to no surprise. But then,  why was everyone else blind? Surely there were those who lived unaware of anything that wasn’t part of their own world, but there were also those who possibly just pretended.
Was it fear? She could sense in them a certain dislike if not hatred of anything different from themselves. Or perhaps they were tired and felt powerless to change anything. They preferred to give up and leave everyone to their own devices. After all the government was doing its best to help. Each one to their own; they probably were all just trying to feed their own vices and addictions... and what's the point of ruining your own New year's Eve worrying about the destiny of the downtrodden?

She wondered what it would be like to be homeless and be ignored by everybody. How would it feel to see all these people celebrating, oblivious to you, purposefully ignoring you or secretly thinking you were just useless scum? Would you be afraid? Sad? Angry? Would you crave to be part of the “society” you were cast off from or did you just despise it? Or would you just shut it all out trying to make some cash the best way you could and hope to make it till tomorrow unscathed?

What was it like to be sitting on the street for hours on end, under the rain and snow, perhaps hungry, alone, shivering, watching people trying to pretend they weren't noticing you? What was it like to feel incapable of earning a decent living, feeling like a failure, or perhaps openly hating the rat race only to end up dependent on those who still were in it? She imagined the rage, the emptiness, the despair she'd feel. She imagined waiting for death to end it all; a life in which the black hole inside would grow deeper each day until it eventually would suck her down in a wordless void. How cruel would the world seem, how senselessly indifferent. There would be no space for hope or dreams. Just mistrust and disappointment.  And yet what was for her just a fantasy, for them was an everyday reality. 

All her life she had spent living sheltered in her family home in Rome, with her parents looking after her, her garden, her friends and her dreams of escape. She had imagined the world to be a place of romantic adventure. She had imagined the Scotland she had read about in books, and it was different from this. It was a place of mystery and beauty, a place of noble sublimity. But the Edinburgh she imagined lost in dark nights and hazy morning mists, populated by the ghosts of legends long as ancient as the abandoned cemeteries of its long dead ancestors was just a dream.

 The real Edinburgh was far from all that. To come to see its reality had been like being woken by a  harsh slap in the face. First, the disillusion had dragged her down into a spiral of depression, and after a while, the sadness had become so familiar she couldn't see the difference between the emptiness she was feeling inside and the harsh reality of the outside of herself. And so slowly she’d become deeply sensitized to the dark side of everything, the one people seemed to try to ignore and escape from. It was all she could see: like a parallel dimension to what everyone wanted to see. It was made out of craters, empty ravenous mouths like the lives of those who had been left out of the artificial dream of happiness the successful had weaved for themselves. They were the lives of all those who couldn’t keep up with pretenses; those who lived in grey box houses in the forgotten suburbia, those who'd never known anything else; their dreams had died before being allowed to surface, cut at the root, smashed against a wall of violence and ignorance.  There was no space for hope and expectation in their life. There was only broken glass in a tight fist, dust laying silently over a windowsill, a clock ticking blankly in the background,   garbage forgotten  outside a drab tenement flat; they were the lives of boys and girls who had lost themselves somewhere along the line of their teenage awakening and were desperately trying to numb the emptiness with something lethal. Anything to kill the pain, anything to forget what it was like to know there was nothing to hold on to,  anything to pretend those climbing surfaces wouldn't always be too slippery to avoid their fall. And eventually, they would all fall... 

She wondered how different she was from them. What was her black hole made of? had she given up yet? Wherever she went she couldn’t help noticing what was missing in the faces of the passers-by, in the eyes of old people who had seen too much. She could see the empty spaces in the stares of the bad teethed drunken guys who deliriously staggered home after a night at the pub; she could see the silenced despair in the young women wearing impossibly high heels calling for a cab with a man they'd just met. She could see the numbness in the steps of a lonely student shopping for frozen pizza on a Friday night and the shameful regret in the face of a young mother pushing her pram along the street wishing she'd waited just a little bit longer.

 The pain didn't get easier to bear with time. She didn't grow accustomed to it. Instead, she felt a burning responsibility to make use of her awareness and yet she was unable to find a way to deal with it.  Being able to perceive things this way often seemed more like a curse than a blessing. And what difference did it make to the world anyway? Wasn't she just adding to the overall sadness and dejection? She couldn't ignore the suffering of others and yet she felt so small, insignificant, frustrated and helpless for not being able to do anything about it. Would she one day discover a way to avoid the constant state of misery she felt at the sight of a world that hid so much pain behind its public façade?

Looking ahead of herself nothing seemed to hide an answer to such questions, and everyone on the street seemed to just reflect her stare back at her, blankly. Perhaps she was meant to wander aimlessly like this for the rest of her life and bear on her shoulders the burden of pain others refused to carry. Or perhaps she was to grow up and forget all about it and carry on as if it never existed. But neither of those two possibilities seemed right. After all, what she wanted was the same as everybody else: a bit more joy, and a bit more beauty. No matter how hard she thought of a solution, it would never come and in the end, all that seemed sure was that everything would go on as usual.

The closed shops on Princess street would re-open on Monday and life would go on as it always had. So what was the point of it all? Why even exist? Eventually, all thoughts would lead to the same question: the final riddle humans had tried to solve for thousands of years without ever finding an answer. Or had they? She would never know until she’d find the answer for herself. Perhaps it was the naivety of youth that made her believe she could succeed where everybody else had failed… 

Or maybe they hadn’t tried hard enough. Or someone had found “the answer” and nobody knew about it. Or what if there wasn’t such a thing and we were all just meant to arbitrarily choose a purpose just to make sense of our own lives? Still, nothing made sense. Questions swarmed in her head like flies buzzing in a small room trying to get out. She needed to interrupt this internal dialogue and look at the world outside though she didn’t want to. Where had she ended up? 

Her feet had brought her to a corner of Princess St where she had turned off into a side road. Absentmindedly she had left the center of town and had ended up standing at the entrance gate to the river’s path. There was a strange atmosphere hanging over it. She imagined it was as if time and space had momentarily ceased, to mark the passage into a world of nature. A sense of stillness permeated the air and although the occasional car horn was still to be heard, there was more space for the sound of water, which still flowed undisturbed despite the freezing temperature. 

She could remember the first time she’d been here. She had just arrived in town. It had been easy then to let her dreams take over and transform everything. The first time she had heard of Dean’s Village she had imagined it to be a place where a small stream ran freely down an old fashioned village made of red bricks. Dark and tall shadows would appear behind corners only to whisper riddles and poems whose meaning she could not grasp. But now it was different. The real world was a lot harsher and she could no longer ignore it. Like a bad smell, what surrounded her now demanded to be acknowledged. 

 The river did smell of rotten garbage and the village was abandoned apart from a couple of old folks waiting behind an arch for the shuttle to take them to the city mall. There was no sign of ghosts and hazy mists. The morning was cold and grey. All her attempts to actualize her adolescent fantasies had collided against a wall of squalor, making her feel more and more disillusioned.  All the times she had tried to find the pure beauty of her dreams outside her inner world she had miserably failed because that kind of outer reality didn't exist anymore. Or much more likely it had never existed. 

A gloomy mantle of despondency began to fall over her: it was like a heavy cloak of grey hopeless mourning. It was as if something inside her had been condemned; like the feeling a child gets when she suddenly discovers magic isn't real and her parents have been lying all along. Nothing is left but the smell of stale decay after the destruction of innocence; after all, all illusions must die and then only absence remains; afterward the void is filled with the blithesome side of life which pollutes the soul just like man pollutes its natural environment.

            Perhaps there were indeed dark shadows wandering alongside the river, but they weren’t the romantic ones the novels described; instead, they were bodies belonging to people trying to lift themselves from an inner desolation they could not even name. When they failed to recognize the answer did not lay in anything external they just gave up. 

These ghosts had lost hope; they had abandoned themselves, leaving behind the ghastly gaping walls of their homes. They had opted out, eternally waiting for a bus that never came, staring at nothing like sleepwalkers in a slumber without dreams. Just as easily as them she could fall asleep, eventually. Just like them she had been clinging to anything that looked like some salvation, but could never be saved. The pull of suicide was like a vortex that would eat everything she had held sacred and real. It was gnawing at her insides, creating a vortex that was becoming more vast and powerful each day. She longed to throw something in it that would make it heal, some medicinal antidote that would make it stop spinning and pulling her in. But the loneliness gathered strength and left her hungry for more.

Suddenly it struck her: her story was the same as everyone else's. She wasn’t special. Plain ordinary despair grew out of everyone like a heavy illness. It was the same old sense of being slowly squashed underneath a pressing sky indifferent to human strife. And it left her walking through a nightmare that everyone seemed to have accepted as normality. Of course, everybody’s eyes betrayed a slightly different kind of madness, but the shadow of a similar fear was always present behind the mask they wore. 

And still, there was nothing really in the sky that was cruel. The sky was just being itself, just like the snow did what it had to do. The wind and rain and sun were following their own natural cycles of existence, perhaps just as everyone did, without fully being aware of it. Maybe you just had to walk on, aimlessly perhaps, to wherever your feet would take you. Maybe you just had to keep on breathing and see what would happen. 

  And so realized she had walked away from the houses and over a small bridge on the other side of the river. Leaving Dean’s Village’s behind, she had followed a small path which led up a hill dense with vegetation. It had seemed to promise more peace, as it twisted its way upwards and grew narrower. After a few steps, it had been impossible to see the rooftops of Deans’ Village, the river underneath them, and the city on the other side. The sounds could still be heard, although somewhat muffled though instead of birds only people’s voices echoed in the air. There was litter all over the grass. Still, she couldn’t look at it for too long without turning her head up to the branches and the leaves of the trees. If you looked up for a bit you could see they were still full of mystery and life... 

Somehow, although the park seemed to be so vulnerable to man’s destruction, the trees still exuded something that could only be described as an elusive yet poignant kind of wisdom. She had no idea what it meant but in the midst of their immobile existence thoughts couldn’t take over. It was as if all human concepts quarrels and constructions seemed silly and irrelevant among them. Words, like garbage, could only exist in cities, where there was no nature, and thus humans were alienated from themselves. 

Again everything mirrored everything else: the raping of nature reflected the raping of the feminine principle inside a ravaged humanity and nobody could say which had come first; once the cycle had begun it was hard to break. But then again, was there a way to break it or was mankind condemned to self implode? Again she was caught in a problem that was impossible to solve. And again the only relief could be found in letting herself be lost, trying to forget the questions in the light rustling of the wind sifting through the trees’ leaves. What else could be done except for keeping on going, trying to find some kind of faith that someday her eyes would show her something worth a smile…?

With this in mind, she continued walking up till she reached the top of the hill. At the summit was the old cemetery. Like most Scottish graveyard it was surrounded by a heavy iron fence and a spiked gate. For some reason, she loved the Gothic architecture. It was threatening and yet sublime. The dead were certainly well guarded... 

  She hesitated before entering. It was still early in the morning and there was nobody about. Everything was covered in white. She had imagined this place to be spelling abandonment and desolation but instead, it was just a plain old cemetery. Somehow this disappointed her. If it had been the beautifully decadent and overgrown graveyard she had longed it to be, it would have maybe offered her some solace. Being so close to the dead she could have discovered a reason to go on living. Or else, maybe she could have finally made up her mind and put an end to it all, bailout and escape her pain once and for all. But no, even the experience of going to see the departed had to be removed as far as possible from the real experience of dying. It had to be pleasant, clean: totally devoid of any reminder of its true essence. If anything it was the streets which were filled with death... This was not the place to look for answers. And maybe there were no answers to be found at all.

Advancing towards the fence she noticed the view. She walked over to find out what lay behind it. She hadn’t known exactly what it would be but of course, it was the city, stretching as far as the eyes could see. It looked like a grey monster, sleeping at the bottom of a steep cliff. Smoke was rising from some of the brick chimneys, car horns honked in the air and screams and arguments rose up and spread into the clouds. She wished she didn’t have to see it anymore. It could be simple. She could close her eyes. It would be easy to let her self fall… She would only need to gather a little strength... Before she knew it, it would be over. 
And yet something inside her wouldn’t let her do it.

-Maybe I’m just a coward- she thought –but how could it possibly be that easy?-

Doubt had infiltrated her resolve. How could she be one hundred percent sure that everything, would really be gone? What if even escape was an illusion? What if death was not the end? What if there was more strife to be had on the other side, or what if you just had to be reborn and go through the same old game again and again…? That would the ultimate idea of hell. And even if death was really just dissolution, what if there was something in the future which she’d miss out on by giving up now? There was no way to know, and the risk seemed just too great. Maybe it was impossible to run away from it all. And maybe the answer had to be found in such unavoidable truth…

When she opened her eyes again the morning light hit her pupils as if for the first time. It was intense; as if she had spent quite a while in an obscured room only to be surprised by a door who had been left ajar. Standing on the edge of the fence she took a step back and looked over one last time. She hadn't had a sudden revelation. She just decided to stop trying so hard. She took a deep breath in, sighted and slowly started on her way back home. 

Copyright Elisa Di Napoli 2012