Filed under: things I write whilst sitting in Trafalgar Square on a beautifully sunshiney day.
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The city doesn’t speak to her. Theirs is a silent, speechless relationship. Instead, it opens itself for her, lets her prowl alleyways and turn down streets she never knew existed. She still has so much more to see.
There’s a countdown in her head; all this will end. She hears it when she returns to her favourite areas, walks the same streets again and again, but she just can’t bear to reach outside the five-pointed star she keeps tracing. Besides, the places she returns to are never the same twice. Oh, the buildings are the same, age-old architecture and established shops and tourist traps that have worked for decades upon decades. But the people are always different, always new. She can sit in one place for hours day after day and never see the same tableau.
They don’t talk, don’t carry on conversations, never hold congress. But sometimes she lets the people speak for the city; or, rather, the city lets the people speak for it. Every tongue, accent, dialect is here, but that’s not what matters to her. Every once in a while, the noise of the city takes her over. As a general rule, she hates cities for the constant sound. Cities are never silent. But sometimes—and she’s starting to crave it, letting it happen more and more often—her brain turns off, lets the sound sweep over her.
Perhaps this is how the audience listens to music or watches television, but never her. Even in class—especially in class—she has at least three stories unwinding in her mind. Conversations, even with friends or loved ones, are never the only thought-path she travels down. So the very fact that she shuts her brain off, lets it go blissfully blank, is unbelievable. Meditation has never had the same effect, and she’s been trying with frustratingly little success for years.
She’s not a city girl, no matter what this piece may convince the audience of. Six hours and she’s ready to go home, to the stale quiet of the suburban neighborhood, to her rapid fire personal monologue, to her friends that live halfway across the world and can only be reached via the internet.
But then she remembers having no thought but keep walking, weaving between people, watching the play between the people and the city—and she is incredibly, inconceivably, inconsolably in love.
(She’s also known for her dramatics. But the fondness is there, no matter what terms it’s couched in.)
She and her boyfriend have a running joke about how she’s cheating on her best friend (sister from another family, platonic soulmate, everything she is and everything she lacks) with him. This has now extended to how she’s cheating on him with the city. That is the relationship; an affair; an adulterous lover that she can’t quit, nor does she want to. Untouchable and distant until she makes herself known and asserts her demands and then, completely overwhelming.
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Suffice to say, I had a very nice day in Central, wandering through Soho and the streets between Covent Garden and the Strand and everywhere in between.
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