Big Mountain

For me to walk to work everyday it takes about eleven minutes. From our attic apartment, past the car wash run by the Latino couple, around the corner past the hardware store and up to where I cross the road, next to the cafe.
From this point on I try to vary my journey as much as possible. Sometimes I’ll keep on along the main road, other times I’ll thread my way through the back streets or wander past the junior school.
I read somewhere that it’s beneficial to spiritual health to change your route every day. When you live in the third biggest city in Spain, you have to do anything you can to keep yourself spiritually sound. There’s not much surface area, so everyone squeezes themselves into apartment blocks, crowded onto avenues and around plazas, elbowing and jostling for space. Looking up at them they lean over toward you like giants, leaving long skewers of sky above their heads. There isn’t much room for your eyes.
No matter which direction I choose to commute, I always start at the same place.  At the same corner. A corner that connects the school to the council building, connects the crossing to the cafe.
The corner used to be brown and green. Scraggly heads of sapling trees used to peek above the cheap metal fence, with its cheap metal gate and cheap rusty chain. I used to listen to the music of the grasshoppers and calls of the cicadas. I used to watch the bats zig zag  through the evenings, through the square of sky, clear and white, that hung over it.
And behind the cheap metal fence, in the eye of my mind, I could see the metropolis of grasses and plants, the townsfolk of feral cats, curious rodents and city birds. Wild and changing.
Perhaps I blinked for too long or fell asleep one day.
When I woke up a mountain had been built. Built by big yellow machines and shouting men in yellow hats. Giant cranes that lifted its peak into that sublime square of sky. Cement trucks that poured it’s foot deep down into the earth.
Now the insects don’t sing and the bats don’t fly and the plants don’t grow. Instead they stand with me like mourners at a funeral. I should tell them to find some other piece of ground to call their own, some other sanctuary. But I understand just as well as them. Just as well as the evicted cat colonies or the pigeons that lost their drinking fountains. We all know there is no place for us in this city. There is no place for chaos. There is no space for that which cannot be contained, for that which cannot be controlled. 
I still alter my walk to work every day. And when I pass the mountain, between the school and the council buildings I sometimes hear the echoes of the crickets and the cicadas. And when I squint my eyes to the windows that reflect the Mediterranean sun, I sometimes see the shadow of a bat escaping to that slice of sky.