It’s been there for as long as I can remember, I was told that it was built long before I was born. The wall, built with brutal smooth and rough along its concrete ridges and columns, had towered over me every time I saw it. It was a common occurrence to see it, one would usually encounter it while traveling the inner city. When I was a kid, my mother had told me to ignore it, telling me that it was just a building and nothing more. I didn’t believe her, and to this day I still have my doubts about the wall’s reason for standing wide and strong. It was like a chiseled row of mountain had been carved out of the earth by God himself, the slanted smoke gray front was punctuated by bulging flat towers that ran up to the top.
The sky was a stormy fog today, the blanket of silky clouds had engulfed the sky, the air was cool and misty. I was walking along the inner edge of the city, covered from head to toe in gray fabric and leather, with my hands in my coat pockets. I had gazed upon the imposing and institutional stature of the building in front of me, after observing the wall for a while, I decided to walk further. Surely, there must be an opening or a door somewhere, maybe a tiny back door that a worker might use, or maybe a gate. I thought about how I might get in, not knowing that I trekked for almost an hour, being mesmerized by the entrancing aura of the concrete and steel. It was like if every bit and block of it was meticulously woven and pieced together, every part, and every inch of the wall appeared to be perfectly aligned and angled. Somehow, the wall was drawing me in, like I was meant to kneel to it.
I stopped, and I shook. Maybe this was a bad idea, maybe I should just go home and pretend this never happened, nobody will know, right? I checked my watch to see what time it was, it was 2:12 PM. Even still, I had an itch, a need to know what was in there, what was concealed under those thick walls of stone and steel. I need, to know. I have to scratch that itch, no, I need to satisfy it, to find out what those walls are keeping me from. Whatever was behind there, I needed to see it with my own eyes.
So I took another step forward, and I started to pace along the ridge of the base, dragging my fingers along the cold, smooth surface as my boots clomped against the ground. Eventually I stopped at a glass doorway, and I inched forward to it. I pushed the right door open and slowly walked my way inside. My boots were tapping as I stepped on the white tile floor, I wandered through the dark sterile hallways of the inside. The walls and air were as silent as a dead rose, and the bends and doorways of the complex inside were void of life, only filled with dead clean smooth on their surfaces.
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