There stood a boy with a broken crown in his hands, not knowing that from these shards would one day come the gift of imagination. Later, much later, inside of a body having outgrown the sweet smelling palm trees of his childhood, the eyes of the same boy would light up, looking up and finding, in the red and grey of the afternoon sky, the one who wore it.
The smell of the midday rain still clung to nostrils, much like its defeated foe, dust would, on a dry sunny day. I do not recall, or rather, cannot wrap my mind around the reasons which pulled me out of the shop to look at the sky at that moment, from that angle, with my eyes tearing up ever so slightly. There he was, and the grey and red of the sky were his tears and blood. He had fallen, a giant king magnificent and ridiculous at the same time, like fallen statues or noseless sphinxes, and the clouds carried his life away.Slowly, inexorably, a pilgrimage towards the east, as if returning the rays to the birthplace of the sun. They disguised themselves into grotesque shapes, imitations of clouds, in the pink velvet of exposed organs or smiling skeletons of red. The sun shone through his wounds. He looked down and knew I saw him. In this moment, in the moment our eyes crossed, I knew he saw me, I knew he recognised me, that boy with a broken crown in hand. That day I was the one bleeding, but those were only the blades of sugar canes against my skin, but today, I looked at him, expiring his last with my throat burning with a thousand questions but my lips dry as the summer dust. Who was he? What was his name? Why did he did? Was it worth it? One question my mind did not dare to ask though, was the name of his killer, for the deeper recesses of my souls knew the answer to this question and my heart engaged into that little dance which makes the ribcage suddenly feel like a cramped place.
As I walked back into the shop, a tear fled from the confines of my ducts and died on the floor, most probably trampled by couple of minutes later by an unknowing customer, not able to see me scrape off the blood from under my fingernails with the shards of a broken crown.