I came to Paradise
alone. My friend needed to get back to work, and wasn’t interested anyway. She
was sceptical that Paradise could be a city of joy when it was buried in /dust
and dirt.
It was true that not long before my time it was a city of floods. On the day of my arrival, I almost sank in a mire. I was pulled out however, by the Paridisians.
‘Look,’ they said, pointing to wooden planks, ‘We have prepared a path for all strangers, available for only a small expense. Make sure you keep to it and all will be well.’
I had been told various stories of the dangers that isolation breeds. How it caused citizens to stick in a grove, etched out over generations. However, I had been determined to go to Paradise. Entry was a privilege not a right. I had to let it go and then when it was ready, not me, return.
‘This is what you must do,’ they told me. ‘You didn’t think it would be easy did you? We want no one who needs this place so badly they’d choke it. We have stopped time here. That takes effort.’
Hundreds of others, richer than me, were walking the streets. There were changes already. The paths were wider and swept. The facades of the old town had been blasted clean so they gleamed white again like a century before. The visitors claimed to love everything for what it was, but then divided it in to easily portable pieces to take away and then
rebuild into something they recognised.
Each one of them desperate to grab a piece before it disappeared, which made it disappear faster. I found my hands grasping like the others, out of fear of them closing on nothing.