He pushed through the crowd, working his way towards his destination...
weaving his way through the mass of human life in the street, a moving
forest of humanity that could bring anything at all to him. The next
person to walk towards him could be a mugger or a friend, he could see
someone incredibly beautiful or someone dreadfully ugly, anything. He
could have a pamphlet shoved into his hand or be asked to donate to some
worthy cause - the pamphlet dropped in a bin of course, the donation a
victim of absence of much searched-for change in his pockets (as he
would carefully demonstrate by rumaging around in his pocket past his
wallet as he walked hastily past the collector). So many things that
could happen, so many stories that could unfold.
He glanced at the shops he was passing, shoe shops, jewelers, cafes,
music stores, alternative shops. So many objects available to him, the
cashed up consumer; so much merchandice that he surely couldn't live
another day without... Some shops he knows he won't ever visit, others
he goes into often. They all somehow manage to stay open, obviously with
enough buyers to keep them fed.
He brushed a discarded fast food box with his foot, clipping it on a
corner and sending it spinning under someone else's feet. Just one more
piece of rubbish in the midst of all the other litter. Thrown away by
someone he will probably never know, at a time he was not there, when
anything at all could have been happening. A thought so full of
unanswerable curiosity that it doesn't bear thinking about. There are
millions of stories out there to be told, most won't reach his ears.
Some will. One is his own. But there will always be millions that he
can't imagine, just as they can't imagine his. So many people in the
world, so few that he will actually meet; fewer that he will like and be
friends with.
A busker's guitar strums into his hearing range as he moves on, getting
ever closer to his destination. Sounds of cars carrying some of the
millions of stories he doesn't know past him, clatter of some of the
millions of people he won't get to know, smatterings of conversations
that aren't his or for him... A plane far overhead shooting off into the
sunset in it's own little story, full of people living out another part
of their stories.
And still he walks on; wearing clothes made by someone he never knew, on
paving laid by someone who won't ever know him, under a sunshade
designed by someone who knows only of stories other than this man's,
breathing air produced by a tree planted by someone he hasn't ever met,
under the same sun that billions of others live out their stories...
Getting ever nearer to his destination, closer and closer to part of his
story... that is, of course, if someone else's story doesn't involve
gunning him down in a botched mugging, or the plane overhead finishing
its story by crashing into the space he walks through...
So he finally reaches his destination, as people go by - absorbed in
their own story, without knowing him or his story. Millions of people
are born, millions die, millions make love; meanwhile this man sits down
and pulls out pen and paper...
He begins to write his story.
11-02-96...