Warm at night

Everybody in the city knows that they cannot step outside of their house at night. It does not matter if it is simply to get something to eat or even just a sniff of fresh air. Moving outside is not safe anymore in this city, and at some level, I knew it was because of something I did. As soon as the sun set on the grey monotonous buildings of the city, it would turn into a battleground. Well, not exactly a battleground. In a battle ground, each player has an equal opportunity to fight against and beat the other no matter how much stronger one is than the other. Yet in the darkness, you had no chance against what was coming to get you. The elder people in the city would tell you that this monster is only in your mind and that stepping out was completely safe. The only reason they can say this is because they don’t step out themselves.

No, you might be thinking why anything wrong would happen if you did absolutely nothing wrong. What you don’t realise is that what you did is not the problem. Yet the problem is what has happened before you. A legend in this city for the past seven years, the nightmare of many children the reason no one ever gets an overnight parking ticket is me. Surprising is it not? I am warning you and telling you stories about myself. Am I not in control? Can I not simply stop myself and let the people out at night? The simple answer is no, yet the main problem is that there is no simple answer to this problem. While it sounds almost selfish, it is true. It all began when I lost all of my money. Eight years ago I was one of the most successful businessmen in this city, or maybe even the world. Yet the problem began when I started taking market share from others in the city.

The big players of the country, which had been dominant for hundreds of years, did not like that I was able to take up this much market share so fast. So they did the simple thing that came to their mind. They burned down my factories. Yet they did not stop there, they burned down all of my properties and even the house that I lived in. All that I had left was in a safe at the central bank of the city, but guess what, that was burned down too. I had lost everything I had, yet the problem was not that they had burned everything I owned. It was how easily they were able to cover it up. How easily the city was able to move on from something that they had seen grow like a tree. Yet no one ever tried to stop it from getting cut. One night as I lay on the sidewalk with the one pair of clothes I was wearing and could save. Then all of a sudden a hammer dropped right in Infront of me, the head of the hammer was on fire.

From that night on, I have always had a burning hammer throughout the night. It started with a motive of revenge. I would destroy everything in my sight, the same way that I felt I was being destroyed. It was as if the hammer was in control of me. This continued for a while and slowly people stopped coming outside. I had nothing much to destroy that I had not tried to already. So I sat there on the sidewalk with the hammer burning and thought to myself that maybe it was just a way of keeping me warm at night, yet all I had done with it was make it colder.