A One Way Street

I could never walk back home without feeling like invisible chains were virtually making me walk. The clouds tried their best to get to me, pointed arrows at any corner of the Earth, but there was only one path I could ever choose. My parents were protective tyrants. Door handles, big liars.

The city sign wrote ‘Kabul’, but it was a sheer warning code for hostile territory. The town was made of constant threats of gunfires to the head. Block No. 20, Amir Kabir Industrial Town was the first ever battlefield to be reported as a ‘quiet town’, in the local newspaper of course. Outsiders called it a grand scale prison, yet there was nothing about it that alluded to evasion. It was worse than jail and hell combined. Both these places being home for sinners, mine was a home for killers disguised in charitable hearts. Unlike prisoners, they didn’t abide by the law. They had the power in themselves to deem whatever they wanted a morally mandatory action. They could inflate themselves with courage over eliciting a bloodbath. Even indisputable scientific laws didn’t draw a line to their power, and they could easily force their new found knowledge in the name of the greater good. They could faint disdain and pretend not to be in control of their horrendous liberties. They could claim their inhumanities to be exactly that, ‘inhuman’, granted by the only entity standing above them, above all things, God. And they weren’t just a pathetic building. They took up space. They weren’t just Amir Kabir, they were a combination of the sky’s meter squares, the ones enfolding the town anyway. There was no escape. No chances to go back. No turning around. Every single pavement from the supermarket, to the mayor’s office, to the wedding bed was a one way street. No habitants could ever be big enough to plant knives in the sky. Even standing up on their tip toes as loud and high as they could, their protest was a waste of no more than a few seconds, and their hope of breaking through the town’s guarded shield wetted a nanoscopic corner of the ground with one single, insignificant drop of rain. It wasn’t written on the road, but it might as well have been. The easiest way to dissolve is to try and stand. As for myself, I wasn’t as dignified as most habitants. I refused a worthy grave and beheld a cattle death with wide arms. I didn’t remain on the ground for long. After a few days, the lofty sky white paint went dry, and what they pretended to be for so long flew me up in a whiff.