Everybody wants to live in a town now. It didn’t used to be this way, I think. Once everybody lived on the land. Then someone built a fence around his and his friends’ houses and locked the gate at night against wild animals, demons and strangers. Later, the fence turned into a wall. Uncle Thomas once told me about his first night behind city walls, when he was still a young boy. He said he felt caged. In town, you could only hear neighbors groan and married couples fart in unison. He said: “when you sleep outside the walls you can hear dragon wings flap in the wind. It’s true,” he said. Uncle Thomas lives in the forest now. He builds furniture that is bought by town folk. “City dwellers will think you’re thick if you’re not from there,” he said. “They even bury their dead within their walls, so that the soul can’t escape into the wild even after death. Isn’t that crazy?” I nodded. I want to be buried under an elm tree on a hill so that I can look out across a bit of land and see some city, too, because perhaps one day everyone will live behind walls. One must think of these things while there’s time, while there still are dragons in the air.
#53/100 Days 2011. Drawing by Taffimai: ”City — Party Time”.
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