Mindscape #15

There’s a neighborhood around here that has, in my opinion, the best atmosphere in the city. The houses are cute and unique, with very well-kept appearances. All streets and sidewalks are organized and clean and decorated with plants, flowers, gardens and trees with branches all over the street. It seems a place for the few, unfortunately.

But maybe it hasn’t always been this restrict for costly and well-preserved residences. In a cloudy day when I was in a mood for exploration, I found, right around the edge of this neighborhood next to a big shopping mall and nearing a swamp area, just at the end of the street, an old and abandoned house.

It’s a two-story building with simple architecture, which would once have look like a fine residence, with a lot of presence of green from the garden and the wild vegetation directly behind it. But now the windows are broken and the walls are mossy gray as the paint is long gone. The bushes are all over the yard and coming over the cracked concrete wall.

It looks so eerie and so out of place that it is surprisingly enchanting. All these beautiful houses don’t appeal my eyes and my soul so much as this house. It seems to hold a dusty and mysterious magic in its history. I felt a connection with the nearest bookstore, as it looks like a place from a children book.

I can’t help but remember all these fantasy books like Harry Potter, Narnia, Golden Compass, Artemis Fowl, Unfortunate Events (those early 00’s series). Strangely then, but maybe because I was listening to an English band, I felt a sudden empathy for England and their culture, and I also felt such a great nostalgia and an urge to revisit these worlds of the past.