We are approaching a cathedral from your youth and there can be no doubt that exploring it will reunite you with that mysterious long severed part of yourself, your childhood, thereby rekindling your sense of place and life. My acquaintance signaled to me with a turn of his face toward that massive gothic structure festooned with barbs like the branches of a desert ocotillo, an ingenious construction to fend off the evil spirits––perhaps their conspicuous absence from modern buildings is to blame for the infestation of our collective spirit: boredom, greed, glass. Almost certainly. What was it that I was supposed to experience? I stood still breathing soundlessly and listening for the past to speak to me in the whispered mutterings of memory, but I heard only someone yelling about god through a megaphone. My acquaintance led me inside and we descended through a corridor to a bunker like cavern housing the ticket booth, placarded with strange hieroglyphs which I could not translate. The unspeaking clerks issued our tickets and we took a brief moment to surmise the appropriate direction of our travel: a ramp leading to a dark portal beyond which we found a tightly spiraling staircase. My acquaintance looked back at me with uncertainty as we ascended the hundreds (thousands?) of narrow steps with great effort. Surely you will remember this experience, it must’ve been very tiresome for you as a child. Focus on the steps.
My acquaintance took me into the narrow walkway surrounding the belfry, nudging me and watching expectantly, obviously looking for some response which I could not contrive. I cannot tolerate the siege of expectations, they surround me as a colonnade of would-be attackers, I draw up my doors and ready the vats of hot oil––damn you! Scatter into the woods and leave me in peace! I treated my acquaintance to the scorn of my face.
From beyond the walls of the tower, my straining ears could discern the chants of a distant but nearing mob and I wondered what they were saying. Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho, Dom… Dom… Dom… Dom… Dom said the bells. Their sonorous ringing came galloping into my ears atop the backs of powerful horses and left without a trace, leaving in its wake a beautiful silence that I might have basked in, but which my acquaintance instead seized upon in order to attack me with a somniferous dirge of tedious facts and questions. How are you feeling? How does it feel to be back in this building? Why don’t you seem to remember me? I decided then to make my escape, rushing around the corner and out through the entrance, so as to throw him off my trail, whereupon I dodged some hooligans ascending the narrow steps, thereby losing my footing and stumbling head over heels down the tower staircase, hundreds or maybe thousands of steps, tumbling for a great while before ultimately coming to rest and feeling not much except for a warm sensation down my back, which must’ve been my ever evasive life making its final daring escape through the back of my skull.
yelling about buildings 