Alone Past Midnight.

Lost in a never ending pit of thought, a youthful boy lays flat on his back in his bed with his eyes fixated on the ceiling board. Music plays softly as it drizzles outside. A peaceful moment it is but it is all suddenly interrupted by the sound of two loud bangs outside. Almost instantaneously, his father dashes into his room. “Get up,we need to leave”. Still greatly confused trying to piece his mind together as he slowly gets up, his father grabs him by his shirt pulling him out into the corridor.

Amid all the fast paced dram, the front door is broken open. Armed men swiftly come through immediately starting a search. “All men and boys in here to surrender themselves to us now, do this freely or we shall use force to extract you”. All this happens in a span of seconds yet seems like a solid couple of minutes. 

As all this happens, the boy’s father stands frozen at the spot he’d reached. Upon hearing the voices leave alone the demands,he turns around and lifts his grown son using all his gathered strength and heads for the boy’s bedroom. Opening the window is a waste of time, the men are close to the room his chance is growing slimmer by the second. He throws his son with great force, force enough to break the window and for him to go through it. The boy screams as he tries to grab onto the air as he has been thrown through the upstairs window. He hits the ground hard but due to the adrenaline pumping through his veins he seems to have felt nothing. He looks all over to see the darkness of the night painted in golden orange as there were fires all over the neighborhood and sharp screams everywhere. He sees a lady running with one of her arms seriously hurt, bleeding profusely and dangling like it could fall off at any moment.

He looks up to see his dad get manhandled beside the bedroom window by the men that had broken into their home. By the way they were dressed, the boy was sure it was the Taliban. “Run son! Run do not look back!” Listening to his father’s instructions, the boy gets up on his feet and runs like his life depends on it when in actual sense his life depended on it. The air smelled of smoke, chaos everywhere and some buildings were almost completely shuttered. There were some big lorries where women and small children were forced to board as the men and old enough boys were on their knees hands behind their heads on the sidewalk. The boy used inside routes to get by through the neighborhood when suddenly he finds himself on a street where he stops and stands there clueless of his next move at the center of the road. How could all of this happen this fast. The once beautiful streets were now full of ruble from damaged buildings, burning cars and people running everywhere aimlessly in all directions. The night is painted yellow by the raging fires, buildings destroyed and the ever so soft wind tainted by the wails of sorrow. The boy stands there in utter confusion not knowing his next move.

With that, I choose to stop the story there. Seems like the way when your on the free version of spotify an advertisement randomly pops up in the middle of your listen. Let your imagination run wild, what do you think will follow? What will the boy do? Where will he go? Why is the Taliban there? Why at night? These questions I choose not to answer. See you next time as we dive even deeper into the unknown.