It was summer in the city. Streets heaved with deep green foliage basking in the sun’s rays. People hurried by in the excitement of the warm food in the bakery window; commuters ran to buses, their home, trains and trams; cars in the distance zoomed past as fast as a Ferrari in the small eyes of workers; people were being pushed from side-to-side; self-righteous people hustled by each other, pushing and barging; people moved swiftly—they did not want to be seen.

A place where endless activity forbids me to wallow in sorrow; a place that has a million faces I will never know; a place where being boredom is virtually nonexistent. That is the city. The prospect of seeing something new every time I walked the small, narrow streets of the city absolutely enthralled me.

I have walked these streets my whole life; I knew them just the same as if engraved in my head and scored in deep. These were the streets I grew up on—bopping to the clamor of the city like I would any groovy number. The song was the gentle patter of people’s footsteps and the rhythmic passing of cars on the street. The high notes were the horns, the sirens, and the screaming. To someone unaccustomed, it could be less than therapeutic, but I was a city guy, and these were the sounds of home.

I was ambling about the streets, easing my way through the bustling, engrossing crowd. Slowly yet steadily pacing to Mama’s office to greet her with her bright neon yellow lunch bag in hand; she would usually opt for less prominent colors, but her work provided her with free lunch bags—and she couldn’t resist. Mama was so rapt this morning in telling me “don’t go near the stove while I’m gone, Knox,” and owing to that, hastily passed over her lunch before heading out to work. I didn’t even think twice when she called from work asking me to bring her lunch to her; eager to seize hold of any opportunity to go out into the city—I at once ridded the lunch from our small 2-room apartment and sprinted out the door.

I recalled being in my room when Mama called; door closed, leaning against it with my back. I stood like that for several minutes, bored; although we had a TV, we could not afford cable—now the TV resides on an empty wall. I slipped down, sat on the tiles, and buried my face in my knees.

Through the opened window, I recall listening to the city hum. People were driving somewhere in their cars, shouting into their cellphones, walking around, meeting their friends, talking about this and that. An airplane high up in the sky intertwined with violet dusk; the smoke plume behind it hung there, glowing with pearl in the sunset.

I found myself sitting in our boxy apartment propping my head by my hand, succumbed to ennui and tediousness.

I guess a discharged battery that has every drop of energy squeezed out it could feel the same way; in the end, only a crumpled aluminum shell is usually left.

I was the epitome of monotony; leaning forwards against a dusty wall, feet pushed far back, carefully drooling, seeing how far the spittle could dangle without breaking.

The apartment felt emptier than a crypt. I couldn’t just sit there watching the walls, no matter how prettily I've painted them. I needed to see real people, talk and laugh; I had to hear their stories and build my own.

Alas, my phone rang and interrupted the deafening silence. My blood woke up my brain, though I thought myself already awake. My smile grew of its own accord and I felt so giddy when I answered.

At the other end, virtually miles away, impossibly far away from me and at the same time right there, in this poky apartment, a woman’s raspy voice sounded—it was Mama.

I snapped back into reality as if it was an emergency. My joyful prance came to a stop when I smelled a faint trace of smoke carried by the warm wind. I was virtually at Mama’s office but opted to, instead, follow a gathering of people joining the crowd around a fire. The mass had cringes on their faces and their noses were stuck up in the air.

Fire trucks raced by with their sirens blaring. Rising even higher in the sky than the buildings, I saw thick, black smoke starting to cloud the bright, clear sky. A crowd began to develop as more people stopped at this foreign smell. Resting the lunch on the lip of the sidewalk, I tailed the smell to nourish my curiosity.

At first, the excited onlookers snapped pictures to upload to friends and generally behaved like a crowd in a magic show; but then a slight shift in the wind brought foul smoke and ash raining down into their hair and eyes. With hands and clothing clamped to their mouths the onlookers stood in complete stillness and apprehension at the lambent inferno.

The heat was oppressive—even from a long distance. The intensifying and pungent smell of smoke cultivated my racing heart.

The crowds became more condensed with the onlookers that wanted to uncover the source of all the commotion. Stooping down, I did my utmost to race ahead against the crowd. As I neared the flames, a plume of fire exploded into the bright sky, augmenting at a rapid rate. I pushed forward.

Finally emerging to the front, I witnessed the glowing embers leaping and twirling in a fiery dance, twinkling like stars in the hot swirling air before cascading down like elated fire fiends, setting alight a tall brick building.

The nascent fire played amid the kindling like a child with a new toy, its flames leaping in elation, it's quiet crackling like so much giggling in the woods. Fire licked around the building like it meant to play, burning the deep green foliage; and the smell of wood smoke drifted through the air like incense.

The fire spread with ease, steadily obscuring the whole building—from its revolving doors to the large, neon yellow board fastened above the building.

Realization hit me.

I found myself on my knees using my ashy hands to wipe my hair off of my face. No words could depict and no nightmare could compare to the war that was taking place in my mind.

Even the bustle of the city were drab to me now—and the city’s music so much like noise on a child's glockenspiel, grating my nerves.

“I have to go in.”

Insanity stole into my mind like a deranged thief, taking what was important and adding new dangerous ideas. New sparks of ideas that once would have been dismissed as bizarre started to grow roots, deep roots; they started to make sense in one revolutionary eureka moment after another, cascading out of control, and further from the self I once knew—until I was so deep that I no longer recognized the city around me.

I regained my wits and called her on my phone… straight to voicemail.

Red. Everything went red. Vision blurred as cold rage curled within the pit of my stomach. The reminiscences of Mama weighed down on me. Yet, rather than breaking even more, the flames in my stomach rose up to my chest, and creeping through my veins, took over the remainder of my body.

The world was a blur, and random images seemed to drift aimlessly around in an ocean of my thoughts, as though they were being blown about viciously by a hurricane. The whole world felt like a low resolution, a bad quality movie.

The fiery embers danced before me as I took one last breath and closed my eyes.