rust and shadows © Lilly Schwartz 2011

With yesterday’s picture I feel like I’m coming back to an old love of mine: Rusty details of old machines in abandoned buildings were my favourite subjects about 6 years ago. Walking around in abandoned buildings is always a little creepy and depending on how well you know the area you shouldn’t do it alone. I sometimes did, just for kicks, but I’m also a person who walks through dark parks at 4am on my own.
Once, about 10 years ago I was walking through the Stadtpark in my hometown at 4am in the middle of winter. I was walking home from a party in my favourite club at the time. I sometimes did that when I was feeling a bit blue or if the night was exceptionally beautiful. My hometown is Chemnitz, the former Karl-Marx-Stadt in East Germany, and it’s one of the 3 big cities in the state of Saxony. It’s a bit of a working class town and it’s not exactly my most favourite place in the world. I would rather have a giant slug eat my brain than to live there ever again, just to give you an appropriate picture of my actual feelings towards this place.

However, 10 years ago I was still living Chemnitz and I used to go to a club on Friday nights. From there I was walking home that night and I was angry and a bit depressed I remember. There was a thick layer of snow and the footpath was crusty with frozen snow and ice. It takes about 1 1/2 hours to walk from the city centre to where we used to live back then and about halfway there I started to get the feeling that I was being followed. I ignored the feeling since I assumed that It was just the normal paranoia of walking alone through a park that was covered with a layer of snow that swallows all noises. Well, that was until I heard the ice behind me cracking. I’m not heavy, so I could just walk over the layer of ice almost without it making a sound, it must have been something or someone heavier than me. Maybe a tall man. The only animal that could have been heavy enough for that noise was a wild boar, so I would have been in trouble in any case, although I don’t think wild boars ever come to that park.

For a moment I wondered whether I should stop and turn around, but then I thought that it would feel like that silly moment in horror films where the protagonist hears an odd noise in the basement and goes downstairs to check. I consider myself more intelligent than that! Instead I just carried on walking without even changing my pace. I only heard the cracking noise once more about 10 minutes later, but this time further away, almost completely muffled by the snow. I looked back then, but I could see only the glow of the snow and the dark trees looming over me. In retrospect the cracking of the ice was probably just due to the temperature changing closer towards the morning hours. After all, who in their right mind would go into a dark park at 4 am in the dead of winter?