Go for a walk around the neighborhood

Leaving the house, you start walking down the sidewalk. It’s a pleasant, if chilly early spring day out today. The street is empty, most of the driveways are empty too, you guess that everybody must be off at work by this hour.

It is a pleasant walk around the quiet little neighborhood that you once called home. The streets are lined with trees and old, turn of the century, houses from back when this area was first developed. It’s one of the older and more affluent neighborhoods in town and it looks the part. Most of the houses have well kept gardens and yards. Others have cutesy little signs in front of them that say “The Jones’” or “The Campbells’” on the mailbox or in their well kept front yards.

But, as you walk along, there’s also the ever present specter of decay about. You walk down a different block and notice a flat cement slab where a house would be standing, laying empty between two well kept homes. Walking up to the slab through the weed dominated yard, you see graffiti, cigarette butts, and shattered bottles scattered about.

Walking a few blocks further down the street, you reach the train tracks that bisect Midway, stretching eastwards towards the imposing grain elevator in the center of town and westwards into the flat endless prairie, dotted with ancient farmhouses and grain silos.

Across the train tracks, you notice an old warehouse. You check both ways for trains before darting over the tracks to the other side and take a gander at the old building. Around it is an old razor wire topped fence that has been cut away at a bottom corner, enabling entrance for any who would be so brave without having to deal with the razor wire. Ducking through the hole, your feet crunch the leftovers of a glass bottle. Among the ruins you find more cigarette butts, crumpled beer cans, plastic bags, burnt down charcoal, and broken up cardboard boxes; all the normal elements of urban detritus. Also, the walls of the warehouse are decorated with the work of local graffiti artists: a dozen or so tags, a minimalist drawing of a pair of big boobs, “EAT ASS”, “DO SEX”, “FUCK”, and “NOWHERE” written in big letters in neon colors, and a particularly curious and well made drawing of a politician projectile shitting into their own mouth. You feel a pang of nostalgia: the filth, the art, the shadows, all together it almost makes you feel like you're back in the city.

There’s an earthy rumble as a freight train rolls by, making the whole warehouse shake and the empty plastic bags catch the breeze and dance across the floor. You take that as your sign to leave and squeeze back through the fence and wait for the train to pass.

Two hundred and fifty westbound hopper cars later, you finally get to cross back to the other side of the tracks, the rails still hot to the touch. You wander through the neighborhood towards home rather aimlessly, mind empty. You’re doing your best not to think about what the rather jarring changes that have happened in the past day mean. As long as you don’t think about those things, Midway feels a lot like how you left it so many years ago.

You frown. It was that exact feeling of stasis that you hated so much. That things weren’t changing, for you or anybody else. That no one was trying to fight entropy, but rather were just riding the fall all the way down with a sort of resigned dignity. Which upsetted you immensely, made you hate this place as only a young person with dreams of infinite freedom could. Of course that was before you learned that moving to the big city was not going to fix your lack of personal freedom. For all of your anger at living under your parents roof, at least you never had to make a cash deposit on it.

You find yourself back on the sidewalk in front of that same empty lot, the foundation without a house, and stare at it for a long time, wild and overgrown with weeds and garbage.

You sigh and turn for home once more.