Sudetenland Tales by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Sudetenland Tales

Page 16

Spring Street Park had once been a humming artery of life. Mark remembered the midnight jazz leaking out of Ruby’s bar, the street vendors who knew his name, the record store that let him linger for hours, flipping through vinyl and dreams. He and his friends would sit on the curb, trading poems like secrets. There was music in everything back then. Even the insistent, daily, winter rain had rhythm, and it didn’t seem all that long ago.

Now, Ruby’s was a bank branch. The record store a dental office with mood lighting. The poems? Buried in group chats and algorithmic feeds. He barely recognized the “faces” around him; smooth in their perpetually tiny iconic slot, scrolling endlessly, never looking up.

Mark had stopped posting, as the words now came hollow.

"We traded soul for speed," he scribbled in his notebook. "Wonder for convenience. I used to meet myself in reflection; now I chase shadows on screens.”

His pen slowed.

He didn't hate the present. Yes, he did. It felt more like watching a dear friend become someone else. And even in grief, he knew memory wasn’t just nostalgia; it was resistance. So he kept writing only in his notebook. Maybe someone else would find