This post is the second in a series republishing out of print work from LOST FUTURES. This work by Christian Kitson first featured in LOST FUTURES volume 1: in search of lost time. You can read the first here.
It’s the strangest thing to say goodbye to an empty city. Taking a lone walk on my first Saturday night, I passed busy bars filled with people, walking alone to consume the ambience, taking note of where we might go together for a drink or lunch or books, and who we’d meet where. Multitudes, a collage of a walk. Overwhelmed, I sat on cathedral steps for peace and temporal suspension. We spent two months holed up in a crumbling castle.
I didn’t know then that I was walking though the last weekend of normality and I don’t think any of us knew what was approaching, too fast to comprehend.
On my last day in the city I retraced my steps to say goodbye, passing the same places I did on that first night, strange empty spaces of a city gone quiet. Finally I sat again on the quiet cathedral steps, counting ghosts.
We’d built our castle to weather the storm, but the slow terrible fear of an unending siege became too much for either of us to bear. Walls tumbled down. So we went our separate ways, leaving the city, and hence my goodbye tour of evening streets.
But now consider the strange thing I realised on that last walk I took - the city was never mine. The strange conditions meant that I spent two months walking and cycling around, learning its streets from the outside but seeing the interior of nowhere.
Stranger still is that this was only a few quick months ago. My temporal record has jumped, from chapter to chapter, and there is no evidence in the day to day that this strange episode ever happened at all.
Photos become uncoupled from tangible memories, the associated emotions become detached, jumbled, forgotten and misremembered. The past rewrites itself in time.
Don’t you ever find yourself reaching out for the light which travels away faster than you can ever stretch?
Yet I swear that the haunting ghostly feeling which sometimes comes to me as I close my eyes has not changed one bit. In time, as the cycle goes, I will welcome the ghost as a friend and add it to the count.