Ollie: A Fictional Narrative

Ollie
London isn't an ugly place, it's only filled with ugly people. It’d be a wonder if you could even see it from the sky. He expected that all the people, bustling like ants below, all the meaningless fuss, all the lights of shows no one cared a thing about would be hidden completely by all the fumes. He also expected that without all the people it’d be quite nice, too. Without them the smog would dissipate and one could actually sleep without the incessant noise. Then again, perhaps the silence would become unbearable, you never know. This thought has crossed him at least a dozen times before and by the end of it he always seemed to come to the same tireless conclusion. That would be that people die and people change, that people are people,
Movement seemed to keep the sharpness of the wind at bay, so he continued to do just that, move. He wandered, as would be best to put it, past slightly different versions of the very things he had hoped to escape. Instead of the letters piling up over a coffee table it was people, crowding under a single balcony to keep out of the cold. Instead of the empty blankets there were full sheets, just as stained, only meaningful. Instead of festering on a personless sofa they were keeping someone warm, or as warm as they could managed. He supposed this wasn't so awful after all and when reconsidered, nothing at all like what he had left behind.
Again, the wind came at him with its needles, stinging like loneliness, so he began to move again. He watched the cobblestone beneath his feet, shining with water from snow too warm to stick to the ground. He watched his own shoes that were stained with ink and coffee. He found that stains weren't distasteful in themselves but that it was the source of their discoloration that held the sour taste. He didn't mind the stains on his shoes in the way he minded the ones touching the walls in the bedroom that crawled like shadows to the