I love you, island city

[dying_dysk]

In 4 Jahren nur 79 Beiträge...autsch..und da mein virtuell noch nicht eingetretenes Voranschreiten aus dem Studentendasein kurioserweise nun demnächst der Faktenlage widersprechen wird, wage ich noch schnell den Sprung in die Prosa mit einer kleinen Geschichte von vor anderthalb Jahren, die von der Stimmung her durch das nahende Ende meines Auslandsjahres gefärbt wurde.
Würde mich ja reizen, zu erfahren, was ihr denkt, um welche Stadt es sich wohl handeln könnte :-) ... beste Wünsche, bis bald.

Björn B.
Island city.

He stepped out of the house, immediately being overwhelmed by the relentless heat. He put on his sunglasses, put his left hand into the pocket of his jeans and walked down the stairs. The offices on ground floor and first floor had closed at 5 p.m. so the building was empty, supposedly. Had it been so empty everyday? He left it behind slowly, entering campus. There’s a difference between something empty and something deserted, though, he thought.
It was over. The feeling that something was over had developed, and it had worked into the last days like a drug in the veins of an already weakened body. Danny, his friend, had left two weeks before, leaving an empty space behind in the flat, but even emptier a space in his heart, in his memory.
Outside, men dressed in brown and blue office trousers passed by, their checkered shirts stuffed into the hips, the toy soldiers of bureaucracy, pen-armed and smiling. A bus also passed by, a line that entered campus on its daily route and routine.
This smell I’m going to miss, he thought. Exhaust fumes, the odor of island city, sewage breath and something burning, always. How will it be like to go? He explained his situation to himself in terms of an actor, ready to step out onto the stage of life, again, the view onto the audience always obscured by that veil you can’t see through until the very last moment. This moment was about to arrive.
On his way to the gate of the campus he passed several hostels but he did not run into anybody he knew. Not today. Everybody was strange this day, maybe it was because he was becoming strange to the place himself. The palm trees, so high you had to tilt your head against the blue afternoon sky, were shaking their leaves, a gentle tremble only, waving, and the smaller trees that sheltered the six benches were still. In the evening, crows would habitate them, as always. That’s where those white blotches come from on campus. They hadn’t spared him either, ending some of the talks he had there. The campus road would be speckled with sleeping dogs when darkness arose, curled together, always on the watch, being scared.
He waved his hand to the guardhouse as he left the grounds and walked towards the main road. It was so literally god-damned hot. The sun burned the tarmac, piercing it, boiling it, like a woman who hates her face in the mirror. The everlasting enemy of the road, traffic, rushed past. He turned left, took notice of the subtle stench of the shit trench behind the small Chinese restaurants and xerox shops lining the roadside. Thank God it was covered by leaves, he thought, otherwise it would pose an insult even to the eye.
Over there were those two bus stops. He sat down on the tube of the first queueing area, where so many had sat before him that the red colour on top was away, uncovering brown shiny metal. A cigarette wouldn’t be bad now. Just behind, there was a stall, a small wooden shack decored by packs of chewing tobacco and chips. He bought a single local made, but didn’t light it yet. You don’t smoke on bus stands. Instead, he dropped it into the pocket of his shirt, besides his pen and that hanky which wasn’t his. Just like everybody else did. The invisible millions.
The bus took the corner, scraping the branches of trees, stopping violently behind the stand, spat out his live load onto the road, engine running. He tried to read the white print on the black cloth roll in a small glass window on the side: 313. A bell sounded, the engine revved, so he grabbed hold of the slippery handrail and stepped onto the aluminium platform. Immediately they roared off into the dense craze of traffic.
I’m going to miss this, he thought. I don’t know why, but I’m going to miss this. Somebody had told him, once you reach it takes two weeks and you adapt. He didn’t believe in that, and he didn’t want that, either. Which was the same anyways.
The conductor clapped his ticket puncher. For some nickelback he got his ticket from the moustache man, recycled paper from a stack on a pile in a silver box the conductor was wearing on a lether strap around his left shoulder. The other side of his green cotton suit was lined by the strap of a change bag.
You feel like riding a boat through this traffic, he thought. Maybe I should write a book out of all this. And immediately he felt again this pressure, all the guilt, the insecurity that had accumulated during the chain of events, making him feel shame by merely thinking of selling his impressions to whatever purpose. He could have started to laugh right now, or cry, it was weird. But it didn’t matter. A force had taken the lead of his life, just like a bus running through traffic. He was a passenger in his own life, guilty for not paying the fare of his extended ride.
The bus reached the station area. He had daydreamed a little, he only popped out because some passengers were already standing up, being thrown left and right by the frenzy steering. At least he had learnt how to read the signs better, the signs of life, to listen to the rhythm of his life, to read a bit of the play that was enacted all around. For example, why there was a black blank spot in some places on painted metal. These were the signs of time that told the essential stories. Signs of use. We have them in our soul, too, he thought.
He jumped off, seconds before the bus reached his halt. He entered the station building past fruit juice sellers and newspaper vendors, picked a line and queued in. The same beggar like always was waiting among the masses, sticking out his hand to receive change. Train stations around the world are good terrain for beggars, he thought. And: Oh, I’m not supposed to think like that. There had been such a long time, such a long journey of minds once erected, only to crumble again under the influence of the gravity of knowledge and experience when somebody here was adding a piece to his imaginative mosaic of by giving a tile he hadn’t heard before. He walked down the road of those minds in island city.
He had bought his ticket without taking proper notice. Like an automat. Had he given to the beggar? He had become an automat.
He walked the footover bridge to platform no. 2, where the run-down trains ran down to the popular heart of the city.
The platform was medium crowded. He had never been able to identify rush-hour. The system had proven too complex to find out when there was little crowd. He spat. You just never knew. And that, he thought while standing among the other men on the platform’s second class area, that is the essence of this city. You just never know. It is a living being, it is a gentle beast, an ever-changing labyrinth of concrete, of arterial roads, of cancer, of people taking a shit on the roadside, of dust, dirt and abuse, so much of everything, so much decay and destruction just metres away from glitter and glory, you just wouldn’t find this anywhere else. He was sure. He felt guilty again, but sure, at last. Or not? The train arrived, like an iron worm on metal tongues, silently gliding down into the stomach of a monster, the people on the station got ready for the fight, the sun shone, the train cast shadow, people hung out the doors, some he noticed riding atop, he felt the cigarette in his pocket and full of guilty feelings he thought, you never know, you just never know what happens when you’re free. I love you, island city.

[n/a]

hmm, ich try-e dann mal auf englisch ... zur Übung ...


Can't tell which city it is that you love so dearly ... but anyways:

first: Your vocabulary enables you to write quite a non-German-student-sounding style, which is something to be proud of! (I remember those "English" poems in the poems-section of Unicum ...). Writing "Fließende Englischkenntnise" in your job application would not be an overstatemt! *jealousy*

But (yes, the inevitable "but(t)"): Your syntax tends to be quite "easy"; you mostly start off with a main clause and verb. That creates the impression of a simple stringing-together of sentences. Luckily there are several longer passages loosening that structure.

Ok, genug Hirnverrenkung (und Dank an dict.leo.org für ähm ... Gedächtnishilfe ). Deutsch dann doch einfacher sein:
Hast ein paar dicke Plattitüden und ziemlich scheußliche Metaphern reingehauen ("silently gliding down into the stomach of a monster" - was für ein Monster? Wie siehts aus? Zu undefiniert.), aber prinzipiell echt unterhaltsam; hätte mir aus eigenem Interesse mehr Gedanken über die zwischenmenschliche Seite des Aufenthalts gewünscht als über die Stadt, aber naja, autorensache.

Lesenswert!
Swn