Setting off on a walk without a destination. Making sure to wear the proper attire. The weather is cold and dry. Darkness has fallen across the city, shadows obscure the streets but there are people about, it is still early. Shop windows light up the sidewalk, people are going home , it's friday, they look forward to the weekend. Many seem happy.
What am I looking for, am I following someone or something, not intentionally. I do have a few guides but they are not here, no they are artifacts of fiction, characters in someone else's story not my story. Maybe I have a desire to follow them into their fictional worlds, to become a character. Sometimes walking alone on the streets of a city, not my own, I feel like a detective, Chandler’s Marlow or Hammett's Spade. I don’t have a case to crack or a person to follow but I am ready for a mystery.
I look into the faces of the people I walk by, some are pale and colorless, the life seemingly drained out of them. Others are glowing with vitality, those people I find beautiful. I am interested in their stories, I find myself creating stories to fit the person, before I get too far they have passed me and they are gone into the darkness. Were they real? Am I real to them? Whoa slow down.
^^^^
Groups of young people coagulate on street corners outside bars. I see someone cupping a joint and breathing in deep. Everyone seems to be below 40 years old. I enter a corner door into a hotel lobby, the room is packed with people some kind of festival is taking place. The roar of the crowded room is deafening. I turn around and leave the room was overwhelming. Turning a corner walking down a less crowded street, the pressure of the crowd disapates.
more coming