The morning after...

The outside was like a huge tank of ice cold air. It was freezing, and sort of... empty. I hadn’t seen anyone in hours. But the past hours had felt like days. Like weeks. Sleep had been as absent from the previous night as hope.

I took a right and followed the sidewalk north. The colourful leaves danced around my feet when I walked past them and made me smile for the first time in hours. In days. In weeks. But just  like the leaves my smile was carried away by a cold wind that now picked up.

From the distance, my friends had send me messages asking if everything was alright, but just like me they already knew that nothing had been alright for hours. For days. For weeks. And yet they wanted to talk about it, maybe hoping for some consolation, maybe to take their minds off it somehow.

My place of refuge was not as empty as the streets all around it. But it had suffered and you could tell. Classes had been cancelled. Students cried in the arms of their professors and people holding signs of tolerance and humanity stood in the cold; unheard and unseen, except by themselves.

The warmth inside was variegating. In here I could finally take off my coat. It had felt increasingly heavy with every step of the way. The faces were worried but not desperate. The voices were soft but not weak. Hugs spent relief from the emptiness for a short while. What seemed to vanish in here was the feeling of not understanding and not being understood. That felt good. The eyes were turned to the future in concern. For now a little sunlight started to break through the high windows again. After hours that had felt like days. Like weeks.

When I stepped back outside, the doors closed behind me, locking the remedying voices inside. Even though sunrays had broken through the intimidating grey cover above and had brought a little bit of light to the dark, I put my coat back on. It was still cold outside and I knew, that wasn’t going to change for a while.

In all this emptiness there was hope, though. The people holding signs were still where they were before, but now they were seen and they were joined by people they had never seen and people they will never see. The crying students and professors were gone. Bracing themselves and each other, they were slowly driven to the house and everytime they opened it’s doors the voices from inside resounded louder and louder through the cold emptiness.