Liam ended with a question in the same method he uses to enter or begin something else. The inquiry for his surname, the last word to a very fundamental identity. The lack of himself not knowing what is, of a surname, so basic and yet, retains itself at the core of all persons. Liam does not know it, though he has entered beyond his former space, into a new one.
Was it something to be seen? Or it might still be nothing. He perceived that the depth of something new must also be something he has concealed, for the time it has been emplaced in darkness. If such a something is also a nothingness, then it cannot be something new. It can only be something that was closed up, the same as a wound, the same as the door that was opened. Upon opening this door, a town was revealed to Liam.
A town, full of familiar, though unfamiliar, sights. No sounds, however. Everything comes to his eyes, though nothing enters his ears with anything that resembles life. Even then, to his eyes, there is no movement. If life, then it is only in the fact that he is not blind.
Liam may as well be deaf, if not blind, due to the silence the town, before his standing and astonished self, exudes.
Even if silent, such creates its own sound in the absence of familiar ones.
There seems to be death in all directions. Silence is what reveals it, though the sights are to Liam, the reimagining of a graveyard scene. It is the same as a graveyard, through such a comparison. As when a person can stand above their departed loved one’s spot, there comes to them all the sights. From flowers laid to the earth to the small strands of grass blades peeking in through where the casket was buried to spy upon grief, there are sights. There is no sound, except for when it is broken through our own creations of one. Even then, we can often ignore it.
Communication is a must for humans. If Liam steps forth, crunches his foot into the gravel of the road before him, he will hear it. Would it be communication? It is not, not when Liam is the lone one doing it.
Speaking to himself would be the same. Since before him, the sights are of abandonment, with the sudden intake of silence being the fact of that, loneliness is a permeation. It is of warm weather, in the current season, where the further evidence to the deadness of the town is in the lack of typical summer chatter. One can except at least a murmur or a car engine. There is nothing of this sort.
When Liam finds the moment to blink his eyes several times, he notices that the road before himself has not been maintained. The dividing lines for traffic are faded, as if to be almost invisible, while through the cracks in the blacktop, there is vegetation spurting through.
A lack of maintenance and a feeling of loneliness that to Liam, still seems to embrace him. He says aloud, with a faint whisper, “Am I still somewhere I recognize?”
He stands in place, for a moment more, contemplating his question. A question that cannot receive benefit from an answer. A question that will be lost in the wind, because to Liam, all things seem unfamiliar, though only because it was hidden behind a door. A door he had walked a long hallway to find. A hallway that held, upon its walls, unfamiliar portraits of people he merely pretended to not recognize. He paced them by with as much disdain as distrust to his complexion and eyes.
It was a door, being opened as a wound, to a place with unearthed misunderstanding of all things having been concealed. Concealed beneath a bandage. It had perhaps got infected, because the material to the dressing had been dirtied while the alcohol applied was least potent. A wound not having been healed, properly. Afterall, a wound as what requires an open door is what will reveal what will bring a person to all things indeed misunderstood. Although, when will the wound close?
Upon a moment we can state that Liam is being distracted by his gaze ever forward, down the road towards the beyond, he had not noticed a figure that has appeared to his right. Standing there, appearing feminine in form, though bent forth as though diseased.
She is not diseased, since when Liam does take to noticing human movement within his peripheral vision, he finds this woman’s face to share the most expression. An expression of what is wrong with her, that to Liam’s understanding of it, can be said as one word: distraught.
He says nothing to her, at first, appearing of his own countenance to be debating on the selection of words.
She is the first to speak.
She says, “Why do I remember that detail?”
Puzzled, though still not opening his mouth for words, Liam merely listens to the further speech.
She says, with more context to add upon her previous question, “Why do I remember how he, my father, became the way he was to me?”
Again, Liam does not respond, choosing to deliberately listen when his eyes and jaws calm their tension to appear more frozen in amazement for her than for the entire town.
She adds further context, “How do I remember the details, the path my father took to become so dark of personality? He beat me, scolded me. He never showed me affection. Though, now I can somehow remember his own pain, his own screams. He was never received with a soft hand. He was never given what I wanted from him. How do I remember or even know about this?”
From calmness, next to return to puzzlement, Liam says not to the woman, though more to himself, “What is wrong?” with his voice remaining distant. As he asked that with such distance to the voice, with deliberation in doing so in not directing the question at the woman, she heard him.
When she heard him, she utters the plain word, “Nihil.”
Due to Liam not having asked her the question, he had not heard her answer, for he does not respond. He had lowered his head after asking the question, as he does not raise it any longer to look upon the woman.
From this experience, then back to the road Liam runs his eyes down as if being the lone vehicle within the town. He takes a step and then another, beginning to walk or just beginning. What journey or what road is there to follow? For Liam, he can open one door to end up somewhere else, though it would not be the same. Not the same, though also nothing different. Nothing different, while also nothing new. Just a bandage that needed to be torn off, because the grisly wound had healed with the infection embedded into it. A wound that, with all the grime engrained inside of it, needed to be cut through to run the drops of blood, once more.
Open door, open eyes, open road. Footsteps beat down the grass blades peering through the cracks in the street pavement. It’s as though an effort to fight off reality from bringing this man low to comprehend the losses among a graveyard he could have neglected for its maintenance.
Modern Romanticism 