The sun shines through the transparent walls. The refraction of the light deteriorates the way the inhabitants perceive. The outside world is right there, seemingly of walking distance, but the form fuzzy and escape seems impossible. Some very old inhabitants might still remember the exact form of a maple leave. Maple leaves must be ages ago. Ages ago as in they were still babies and the eternal winter, not yet befell.
Conversations are frozen as ice cubes. Fire is prohibited for logistical reasons. All they can do is wave bare hands, in hope that the ice cubes will melt. In the end people don’t bother to talk. What is the point of talking, if it takes ages to decode what is spoken? Especially the decoded conversations oftentimes are nothing but a long whimper. Living in a confined frozen space, what else is to be spoken?
The inhabitants do not talk. They sit by, but not against, the transparent wall, for fear that their skin might be stuck on the wall and it takes a hundred inhabitant’s laborious waving to free the pathetic being pinned and wriggling on the wall. Incidents like that used to happen, but now people do not bother to rescue anyone anymore. If you get pinned, you die. Since with such low temperature, the corpse will not perish. They will remain as Snow White in the glass coffin. Maybe with not so charming an ending posture, rather their struggles and fear frozen at the prime moment. Perhaps the inhabitants think those people are responsible for their own stupidity. Perhaps a tower made of consolidated water does not translate to solidarity. The inhabitants just happen to be there. There is no sense of community since even the oldest inhabitants cannot recall how they end up trapped there in the first place.
The inhabitants do not wait for Godot. Since waiting entails hope, and hope is nonexistent in this frozen space. The sensibility to the world is somehow lost. (Except getting pinned on the wall. That sight is still embarrassing even in this frozen water inferno). The inhabitants do not feel the cold, neither are they cheered up by the sunlight. Sunlight only means sight, but for most of them sight is meaningless as well. The refraction ruins the point of sight. If they cannot tell real from surreal, what is the point of looking? You might wonder if they get bored. But the truth is they do not, for they no longer perceive the passing of time anymore. Paralysis is the epitome of The Water Tower, and inaction seems to be the mantra.
You might ask, “How do they feel?” Despite the disassociation of sensibility, despite the inability of sensing the temporal advancement, the inhabitants do sometimes feel lonely. No, since the temporal concept does not exist, “sometimes” might as well be replaced by “eternally.” Any frozen moment is the eternity. The inhabitants are eternally lonely. As mentioned above, the sense of community does not exist. The only sense of union proper is the collective consciousness of loneliness. What else to expect, if they are trapped, not talking to each other, and indifferent to each other’s suffering (or more precisely, getting pinned on the wall and wriggling)? The loneliness is so present that it transforms into an incessant series of screams. The inhabitants might have already lost their hearing, so the screaming gets lost within their minds. It will not be hard after all to imagine their mindscape. It will not be hard after all, since the very reason why they cannot feel the cold is their minds are already the coldest place—colder than the polar waste. At least cold enough to freeze their sensibility.
So is the tale of The Water Tower. Here no verdure is to be seen, only frozen water and refracted sunlight. Let there be light, let there be water, let there be winter. Let there be The Water Tower. Let there be the collective consciousness of eternal loneliness.
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