Pocket Revolution

A chill January wind descends upon town like a horde of mad, pillaging vikings, taking roofs, roads, towers, nooks and crannies completely by surprise, violently lashing thick and heavy raindrops against my exposed face. 

I turn up my collar and dig my chin deep into the fabric of my scarf, while the rain continues to pound on an unsheltered world, sparing no-one and nothing. It hammers against the thick, protective bark of groaning, disarranged trees and drums on colourful car roofs, bursting into tiny, glittering fragments on impact.

I quicken my pace and gaze into a dreary, weeping sky, where nature's diorama crowds layers of rolling hills, each one in different shades of blue-ish greys, against a snowy white horizon.

A short, stout woman dressed in a woollen sea of flapping beige coughs past me, sneezing noisily into a crumpled paper handkerchief. A moustached policeman struggles out of his patrol car and strides across the cobblestone road. The smell of coffee-to-go wafts over from his paper cup. An elderly, pale, skinny man wrestles with a mischievous gust of wind over the possession of a black, battered umbrella. Man versus nature. For a change, man prevails.

Below my feet the dirty, brown soup that is the river writhes and burrows through town like a blind, lumbering worm. An overweight, soaked-through nordic walker wheezes past me, already regretting his new year's eve resolution. While he slowly fades from the corner of my eye, I walk past a wall covered with fifteen year old graffiti. 

I stare at the faded colours and the broken letters and pity the same old paroles, the same old swearwords, unchanged for more than a decade, and wonder: doesn't this generation have anything to say anymore? Is rebellion smothered by glaring walls of music, painted with tiny headphones and even tinier iPods, or are the mouse click and the HD-screen the new brush and canvas of revolution? 

I stop for a brief moment and listen, but there is no answer, as the spirit of the rebellious youth remains silent.