The air reeked, not of any olfactory sensation, but of the sheer morbidity of the location. A figure stood among the weeping grass like a discarded silhouette, to be left imprinted upon the desolation as a half-hearted reminder. He wore a plain business suit, which hung raggedly around his shoulders despite its freshness. He was an imposing figure in the city, with a towering gaze and a daunting stride, but he swayed like a stem of wheat, alone in an abandoned field. He had a hat, a rather old-fashioned top hat that he wore pompously (for no one would dare laugh at the anachronism in front of his face), but he had left it to flutter to the ground. The rainwater diffused into the porous material of the hat, but there it remained, prostrate before the steely air.

Why he had come here, he did not know, and he would have continued along his usual business had it not been for the faintest presentiment that glimmered in his mind, like a task long forgotten. Like the shallow twilight burgeoning into the deep dark of night, the presentiment had grown stronger, culminating at this very point, this lost land of nothingness where even the few crows that survived in the midst of the worn rock held their heads bowed to the ground.

He stepped forward. A withered leaf crackled below his right shoe, letting out a discordant cry of outrage. The sound hung suspended in the chilled air, alien, offensive. The gray mountains replied with echoes of the crackle: progeny of his thoughtless action. So he stood motionless thereafter.

It was the first time he had been forced to regret something he had done. His corporate charisma withered in the face of the ashen boulders. How many times before had he been hindered? How many times had he trampled over the said hindrance, sheer willpower flattening everything in sight? And when everything was flattened, was it not this that remained – this barren land of rocks and remorse?
A shadow of his wife’s hand on his cheek fluttered in his memories, fomenting a storm in the orderly, regulated realm of his heart. He could scarcely remember when that tangible reality degenerated into the half-memory that currently trembled within him. He could scarcely remember when the laughter of his children grew softer and softer, drowned out by his business, until it had vanished completely and he was left none the wiser. He could scarcely remember when the men he had shared the bond of friendship with since his adolescence were replaced by strangers in white collar shirts and double-button coats.

He could scarcely remember how he had induced this gradual graying into obsolescence, the petrification of his vitality. He could scarcely recall the origin of his own slow suicide.

But he had not brought himself here to crumple under the mountains’ silent admonishments. There was a moment for reflection, but a reflection in and of itself was useless, a discarded mirror in a scrapyard of inaction. As his head drooped in recollection of memories glossed over in the rat race of his career, the rocks softened, glowing with a welcoming golden hue. A meandering ray of sunlight glanced over the edge of a mountain for a split second, and then returned to invite its brethren to explore the new world, for the wasteland was not as harsh as it had first seemed. The rapidly advancing wave of sunlight engulfed the land, and a warm luminescence emanated from every molecule of air. A light chirp echoed in the breeze, and for the first time he was made aware of other creatures subsisting in his private world of regret.
He had ventured into this world before. Every day, in fact, he had discovered a new threshold into his private prison. In an abandoned warehouse, metal shelves ringing with cold judgment. In an empty courtyard, resounding with soft whispers of conversations long since ended. In his office, white walls offering a canvas for his outpourings. Never had he seen it transform as it did today, metamorphose into a paradise he dared not believe in.

He had the urge, of course, to believe. He had the urge to explore this new paradise, to look around, to find his way, to regain what he had lost. He had the most excruciating urge to dream, but it died quietly within him as he recalled the ashen faces of rock that had persecuted him but moments ago. He sought to rebuild his life’s broken fragments, with careful and judicious effort, but he knew that they were not fragments but ghosts, shadows upon a crumbled wall.

And so, despite how it pained him, he turned away from the sight that beckoned his eyes, a starving man refusing the feast of his life. He straightened his coat and gathered together the papers that had been strewn across the livening earth like seeds of relapse. He returned to his vehicle, and shaded his eyes from the light that had so earnestly made its way over the mountain range, only to recede into the callous stone, leaving behind a rejected paradise. His hat lay discarded in his abandoned world of ashen memories.