Stratagem Or Gladden

Today, I'll tell you a tale that every artist and writers knows. Even though we might not know from which book or in which text it comes from. The Thing that we do know is that six friends lived together in a concrete jungle.  Creepers crawled over buildings and flowers bloomed through what once were windows. Animals had permanant addresses and  mountains of skyscrapers as adventure parks. The streets showing earth through broken cracks were their walkways, the shops lined with moss their caves, the sky was painted in colours of wonder and fishes swam through once sewage system.  Land, Air and water pollution were eradicated from the planet. Noise pollution still existed and a popular topic for concrete elections. All the animals lived peacefully and with a never seen before togetherness. 'Time does touches everyone and it changes everything' was sketched over veins bursting with magic. Within this magical place, six mates lived with freedom. They did what their mind said...

You never walk alone, nobody does. You aren't alone when you are flipping through the pages of a book in a vacant library. You aren't alone when you walk down the murky roads. You aren't alone when you run around your home in the bare minimum. Nor are you alone when you are giving in to the drowsiness of night.  As there is someone who is accompanying you. He's the one who takes all the various forms and does cameos in other people's stories. He's the one whose faint footsteps follow you in the loneliest of places. He's the one touching you as the wind blows by and he's the one who sings the silent lullabies of nightmares. Those who have befriended him are the ones you see walking past you with the bright smiles. While the crimson blood of those who tried to fight him still drips through their eyes. And the ones who tried to hide from him are the ones about whom all the notorious storytellers like to write about. So, today I'll tell you a story of on...

On Christmas Eve, everything in Malta sparkled, apart from the counter of The Lost & Found Café-cum-Bookstore. As the name stated, it was a café with a bookstore, where all the used books parted ways with their readers on the last page and found new ones. Its tiny balcony was draped in tinsel, fairy lights twinkled inside, and a Christmas tree made of books stood proudly in the centre of the room while a playlist that came into existence when different Christmas playlists had an accident was shuffling between carols, pop, rock and kpop. Natalie, a girl in a white Christmas hoodie and red-rimmed glasses flicked through pages of her diary behind the dimly lit counter. She spent most of her time working here, apart from when she was attending classes. Today, not only was the store open till 12 a.m., but there were also Twenty-Four-holiday reads, which were wrapped in gifting paper with a description tag of what they had to offer. The rack had the privilege to be stood next to the best...