The Silent City

The Silent City

There is a city where the clocks have stopped ticking.

No footsteps echo on the pavements, no laughter seeps from windows, and no rustle of life stirs behind the bricks and stone. This city—once alive with rhythm, voices, and breath—now sleeps beneath a shroud of fog and forgetfulness. It is not a city lost to war or swallowed by disaster. No, this is a quieter vanishing. A softer erasure.

It is the kind of silence that does not arrive all at once, but drips in, day by day—like water in a sinking boat.

The buildings stand tall, hollowed out like aging statues, their windows blind, their doors closed to memory. Streetlights flicker not to illuminate, but to mourn. The air is heavy here, not with pollution, but with memory—faint traces of music, the warmth of conversation, the ghost of a shout fading into the fog.

Once, children ran along these sidewalks. Lovers met under the cracked lamppost at the corner of Elmridge and 12th. The market on Sundays smelled of cinnamon bread and ripe tomatoes. Now, only the wind wanders these streets—an uninvited poet brushing its verses across alley walls and rooftops.

There is no traffic here, yet the streets remember. Tire marks faintly preserved on the asphalt, like fossils of motion. Crosswalks that once bore hurried heels now stretch across emptiness. Even the pigeons, faithful as they were, seem to have migrated to louder places.

And yet, the city is not dead. It is merely listening.

To the quiet hum of its own existence. To the breath between moments. It waits—not for rescue, not for rebirth—but for recognition. For someone to look, to notice the quiet beauty of abandonment. There is poetry here, hidden in the cracks of concrete and the rusted fire escapes. In the way ivy dares to climb where no footsteps lead.

Some say the city simply forgot how to speak. Others say it chose silence over chaos. But I believe the city grew tired of noise, and in its exhaustion, it turned inward. It became a monk of brick and steel, cloaked in stillness, whispering truths too delicate for sound.

Sometimes, I walk through its empty avenues—not in search of answers, but presence. And I feel it: the strange comfort of solitude, the serenity of a space untouched by the frantic pulse of the world. I run my fingers along railings still warm with old sunlight, and I swear I hear the sigh of someone who left long ago.

You do not mourn The Silent City. You study it. You listen. You let it teach you that even in absence, there is meaning. Even in stillness, there is a heartbeat—soft, slow, and steady.

And when you leave, you carry its hush with you. Like dust on your shoes. Like a quiet inside your chest that won’t go away.

Because The Silent City is not just a place.

It’s a state of being.

A poem made of empty windows and whispered streets.

And if you’re still enough, it might just let you in.