Exhilaration
You go through this city and the only thing you hear is chimes that ring around in a circle like an echo as you enter it. Soundlessly you walk in trying to remember where you came from and touch the flower bed to embrace the smell of beauty and softness. The chimes become louder and after a while, it becomes deafening enough that you lose consciousness. You wake up to see the sky so low that you touch the clouds with your bare hands. It reminds you of cotton candy, a sweet so precious that it melts in your mouth.
Lying in the flowerbed you are surrounded by the sound of dull chimes and the smell of flowers mixed together to confuse you. You breathe in the smell and find the hills across the field greener than anything you have ever seen. You reach your breaking point and realise that the tears turn into clouds floating away in the low sky, all surrounding you, capturing you in a circle.
You breathe in the flowers once more, their smell intoxicating and filling you with emotions. You wonder if it’s a hallucination that you see but you see a woman walking towards you from the greenest hill you have ever seen. A burst of colours wrapped around her figure, she walks towards you forming a new path in orange and pink, colour so eccentric that they take your breath away. You see her far away and you wait. You wait till she comes to tell you the important secret that she holds. You observe the sky changing, bursting in colours that you have never seen before. She walks towards you until she is so close to you that the colours blind you. She bends down to hold you in her arms and welcomes you to her, she says, “Welcome to Euphoria”.
Tranquillity
Lullabies make themselves welcomed in your ears, bringing in the warmth with them to make you feel comfortable. A tall building in front of you sings to you these lullabies making you feel an emotion that you probably never felt before. The city seems strange and as you walk towards the building, you keep in mind the peach-coloured roads that feel comfortable enough for you to sleep on it. You walk forward and forward, listening to the lullabies and keep walking until you reach a door.
As you open the door you see roses in the shape of beds on the ground and you walk carefully daring yourself to not step on them. You see the names of people of different shapes, sizes and colours and identify some of them to someone you once knew. You feel the same emotion more strongly, but you keep moving forward until you find the source.
Hiding behind the walls is a small girl, fragile but smiling and humming the sweet lullaby that is making you feel that emotion. You feel it so strong now that you cannot control your own emotions. She looks at you and you wonder how she knows this lullaby. So, you bend down and look at her and call out for her. But you realise you do not know her so before you say anything she says, “Calm”.
She tells you her name and yet you wonder about the lullaby she is singing, hiding away behind the walls of an abandoned building, completely soul-less. She looks at you and welcomes you, gives you an invitation to sing with her and you sing. You sing with a voice that you did not even know it existed. You sing till all you feel is content. Your curiosity about your surroundings fades away to nothingness and all you feel is the lullaby, speaking to you in words you barely understand.
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Vexation
This city feels intense from the moment you entered it. The dark green roof above your head tells you that it’s not a city you can mess with. You walk forward till the tunnel’s end but all you can hear are screams. Unfamiliar with the feeling that starts to form you keep moving forward until you reach the end. A dark pit filled with screaming souls lies ahead of you. You are confused as to what made this city this way and you wonder how you reached here.
The screaming intensifies as you start moving down towards the pit. The people in the pit are trying to reach out to you; filling you with emotion that resembles theirs. What you feel is agony and the screaming just intensifies this emotion. Slowly moving forward, you reach the end of the pit, away from the people who are screaming in pain and agony.
You sense her before you see her. She walks in a dress made with red rubies and a crown made of green jewels. Her dress cut out at different angles shows her features and her eyes so striking that it makes your stomach crawl. She moves her head in a gesture to come follow her and you do exactly that. She takes you to where she goes to sit on a chair made of bones and a dark liquid that you recognize as blood.
She sits on the chair and looks at you and tilts her head in an angle that says, ‘come forward’. You move forward but trip over something and you look down to see a skull. When you look up, she is standing in front of you and she says, “Welcome to Anger”. The emotion that you feel intensifies to a blinding point where the only thing you feel is agony and in the next few moments, you pass out on the floor made of skulls.
Consternation
The city reeks of a fish-like scent but much darker as you enter the bridge holding the pathway together. With vehicles of different shapes and sizes zooming past you, this city reminds you of your past, of your life that you once used to have. The stench of this city reminds you of the emotion you felt when you were standing on the bridge back in your hometown. You were afraid but brave enough to do what you did that day on the bridge.
Memories flood your head while you start panicking as you walk through the bridge. You stop in the middle of the bridge and go around the corner to see what is beneath the bridge. You stumble back shocked but come back in again to take a closer look. What you see is a face in the black water looking back at you as if calling for you back down there.
The waves of the black water ripple until the face rises in the form of a man covered in black ordinary clothing and floats above the water to come and stand next to you. You are terrified at first, but the feeling settles in until it’s the only thing that you feel. As the man moves closer to you stumble back until you fall on the hard concrete ground of the bridge. He extends his hand to you and you hesitate. You hesitate because you know what will happen. Although you take his hand anyway because the moment your hands touch the feeling that you are feeling intensifies a hundred folds. You shiver until you start weeping.
“Fear is my name”, He says. “Welcome to my city”. All those memories of the past come rushing back to you and you realise that you are not breathing. You gasp for air, but it becomes so difficult that you lose consciousness.
Epilogue
You walk through the trees to see the clear skies and the ground full of white grass ahead of you. You walk slowly feeling the grass with your bare feet feeling the texture of the grass. Ahead of you on the grounds of the cliff is a small gathering of people you do not understand but have met. You walk forward until you are standing right in front of the gathering and recognize that they are all the people where you felt your emotions at your highest. Pain shoots from your chest but calms down to a feeling you are very familiar with.
You walk until they all one by one introduce themselves again to you, “Euphoria”, “Calm”, “Anger”, and “Fear”. They all whisper their names in front of you and move around in a circle to stand still. In the middle, there is a circle made with bricks and cement where these strangers that have given you a sense of comfort also made you feel uneasy come to sit on this large circle with extended edges. They sit in that shape and look at you with such intensity that you can’t bear looking at them anymore, so you look down at the white grass and make yourself aware of the texture of the grass.
You look up at the sky during this daytime and remember why you came to this city. This city makes you feel at home as if the instances you remember didn’t happen, but they did. And you felt these emotions and they made you feel like you belonged somewhere. Calm gets up and comes forward until she is standing right in front of you and asks you a question. A familiar emotion intensifies until it rests within you like a lifetime passing by. You wonder that it’s a question so foreign, yet you know the answer, so you answer. “My name is Numb, and I believe I am here to join you.”
