I remember the green leaves, the yellow flowers, and the busy streets we walked together. How I lived fulfilled, each day an adventure. How we ventured into that marketplace, and among all the joy, I kept thinking about how I'd be willing to give it all away, in an instant.
Not "in an instant", as if I wanted it. In an instant, as if I had been trained to do so, as if I was training myself to do so each passing day. Flashes filled my eyes, flashes of cracked cement, of a ruined marketplace, of a flood. And of that water, having destroyed everything, soaking into my jacket each stroke I took towards that drowning man. Upon surfacing, I'd lay my jacket among the rubble, and leave it there, right where it now belonged. Yet hearing his heartbeat would make its loss worth it, like hearing the others had made the loss of the marketplace.
You guessed it - I have always had delusions of grandeur. Too often have I thought I was ready to give everything for something greater, thought I wasn't too cowardly to change the world. Yet after walking past that man lying on the street of the eternal city, I've begun to question that. We both glanced back at him, surely did more than the dozens of others walking past. Yet we surely helped him no more than the dozens of others walking past. Ah, how easy it is to walk past! To be unbothered by what isn't your problem, to walk along the eternal streets and hope someone does something - someone else, that is.
At least there was ice cream to distract oneself with. "So you good it has to be a sin," one might've described the taste. Yeah. What if it is? A sin, not in the fossilized sense found embedded in the idioms, but a sin, the blood, the feathers, and the bones that left the fossils. Ah, how easy it is to live in luxury, to lick the ice cream and forget! How easy to keep the jacket and let them drown. Drown in the cement of a busy street, drown in the bills of that hospital, or drown in the endless swarm of mosquitoes. How easy!
It was at this point I realized I could never bring the narration, which I had a long time ago lost the control of, to where I wanted it to go. Goodbye.