Broken Flowers

There is a cold winter wind flowing between the towering skyscrapers, the streets filled with people walking to their destinations. The city like any other city with all its smoke, honking cars and busy people felt claustrophobic. The cluster of people who walked through the pavement like a stream, each person with their own infinite and tremendous problems glinting in their eyes, yet they all walked to their destinations, of which only they know; even though they are all the members of a single stream. In the midst of all this crowd is a man in his late 30s walking along with the crowd with sturdy steps. He stood out in the crowd even though the crowd had people from all walks of life, he had such an elegant and extravagant attire on him, it felt almost as if he had walked out of a celebration. The man had a monotonous look on his face, almost as if devoid of emotions. As he walked past a store, he stopped hesitantly, he had stopped in the middle of the pavement interrupting the crowd like a rock in the stream. He looked up at the store board; XXX: Andy’s Adult Entertainments.

The man stood there for a moment, people stared down at him as they brushed past him into their busy lives, but even for a moment they thought of the man, “What is he doing, standing there alone?”. He looked at the store once again and walked towards it. As he reached to open the store door, he hesitantly pulled his hands away and stood there looking down at his hands in front of the door. He was playing with his ring, ever since his fiancé had given him the ring, he has been fidgeting with it whenever he saw himself in an anxious situation. And he has been anxious a lot since then, the red patch under the ring told that much.

He glanced into the store through the glass window and stopped fidgeting with the ring, and opened the door.

The store has long racks of CDs and novels, and the end of each rack has categorized sections for toys. The store is scarcely populated with occasional heads popping from within the aisles. The man walks to the last cabin avoiding the others. As he searched for the CDs, he looked at the couple section down the aisle where he stood, an entire section of toys for the pleasure of couples. There stood a couple deciding what product to buy. He looks at them and stops his searching for a moment as he thinks, “How much effort humans take to ensure their relationships stay afloat, to ensure the amber of their relationship still burns deep. It must be the dread of being alone in this huge, monstrous world that scares people into desperately trying everything under their power to restore the warmth they felt when they met each other for the first time. All these toys, a way to make themselves believe that their relations can keep beating itself into ‘The Forever’. All cause of a promise made, of which all couples eventually will come to detest, sooner than later”.

As he rode the train of thoughts, he kept on fidgeting with the ring obsessively. The diamond on the ring shined each time he made the ring turn on his finger. The lights around the store made the ring shine in true fashion. All the fidgeting has made the sour turn bright red on his finger, the pain brought him back to reality. He looked at the rack of CDs again, he picked up a pink CD pack, “Broken Flowers”. He looks at it for a second reminding him of a movie he had watched long ago.

As he walks to the cashier, he takes a glance at the toys in the couple’s section. He remembers using them like all the other couples in an effort to delay the inevitable. He reaches the cashier, a boy who just had come of age enough to work at the store. The man hands over the CDs cover to the boy, he jumps into action and starts packing it. As the boy went on with his packing, the man stared at a porn ad playing on the TV screen behind the cashier. The boy was gazing at the man and then to the screen, as he had called the man and yet he hadn't responded to the boy. The boy wants to laugh but remembering his owner's words not to shame the customers or risk losing the job, he gulped down his laughter and called the man again. Like any other person in the world the boy assumed the man was lost in the display of lust and promiscuousness, but the man had travelled through the past and future in that little time he had. The man looks at the cashier with the same soporific eyes. The cashier boy says, “It would be eleven twelve”. The man lost in his travel through memory, he stares at the boy as he removes his ring and keeps it on the table, he says,” Whatever is the price, this will cover the expense and more”. He takes the packet and moves to the door, as he opens the door he looks back at the boy and says, “Thank you”. The man walks out.

Before the boy can come back to his senses after seeing the ring on the desk, the man becomes one with the stream, he becomes the one with the collective loneliness of the city with a burning red patch on his finger where once he wore a ring.

The End