Snapshots of London
Shadows fan out from a muted, stifled window, and the curtains do a poor job of blocking out the solid block of miserable Grey Sky outside, straining to assert its dreary wintery presence in the dim room. It made me wonder what the world would look like if light did not travel in straight lines. Odd, perhaps, but I was in an unusually pensive mood. Grey does that to me.
Trains (all transport, really) are particularly fascinating places, mostly because they are not so much places as interims - moving limbos, mobile purgatories, waiting rooms on wheels. In a train, no one is where they want to be. Some day, I shall make a destination out of the train ride; I shall get on a train simply because I want to be there, and not because I want to be somewhere else.
(And then the world shall fall into chaos).
A young child orbited his harried mother, waving a candy bar, and smiling out the most terrifying words. "Bang bang! I want to kill everybody. Bang bang!" Even more terrifying was his mother's response: "That's nice, dear. Bang bang."
When the world around you pulses with unearthly beauty, and one's first instinct is to lament the lack of a camera instead of greedily drinking the scene in with one's own eyes...when one realizes that capturing the image on glossy technicolour paper has come to have more importance than building a prismatic, multifaceted sensual memory in one's mind...something, readers, is terribly wrong.
Finally, solitude and loneliness are not the same things.