Member-only story
The Place Where All Dreams Shatter
The sea gets it all in the end
The building hovers on the edge of destruction
At the end of Avenue de la Mer, a dusty yellow bulldozer sits on a pile of already vanquished rubble. Half of what was once a corner store and the apartment above it are already gone. The jagged front wall, eaten away by steel teeth, echoes the wind-tattered grandeur of the Cathar castles that sprout like broken teeth from the distant hills. Only the windmills, recently added, stand tall and proud, sharpening slow-moving blades on the wild Catalan wind.
Small business is merciless. You know that. Commerce is a savage ecosystem where decency counts for nothing and pimps and thieves run amok. It’s hard to make a living, even when your dreams are modest. And every closed store or restaurant or bar is the ghost of somebody’s dream that withered and died as they reached for it.
From one end of the stricken building, you can see right in through the vanished wall to where people used to live. The cracked tiles of a half-demolished bathroom. The layers of peeling plaster showing the shifting color preferences of a succession of different owners. Preserved in time like the frescoes of Pompeii, only to fall prey to the steel teeth of progress. The careful architecture of the roof beams…
