Late Arrival

It was a cold dark afternoon. At each breath he paused, each step held his foot, everything caught his attention. Autum leaves jumped from trees and started whirling around. "Who was playing those beats?", he thought. Rain slipped from clouds like the tears from the cheeks. "Whose beloved was crying?". The questions he never confronted before.

She had refused to see him. But he waited and waited, and waited, in her city, between the two towers of beginning and end. He saw many passing shadows of past and future. At two occassions, he ran after a shadow but it slipped first from the wall and then from the eye.

Sun disappeared leaving all the shadows blend together in the darkness. A tiny lamp at the corner of street opened its eye with a blink. Under his feet, he could see his folded shadow which looked tired. An arrow sign on the road asked him to move. He took a long walk back home. He noticed the difference that his shadow was walking ahead of him when he left home, and now it was behind him on the way back.

He kept walking in the dark empty streets. In that way, many months passed. Suddently he stopped and turned. He had heard a bubble burst in the ocean. There was no one behind.

He had escaped the shadow. He could go home now.