Being invisible to the naked eye has the advantage that you can watch and learn.
I sit on a tube train wearing a hat, and I examine the people sitting across from me. Nobody notices, nobody minds. I love looking at people. I love people. I love. I’ve put half a century on the clock and not ever experienced ‘love’, not love in return, not ‘I love you,’ ‘I love you too’ love. I feel love all the time, I gush all aglow at the slightest appearance of beauty or kindness or both or even just quirky adorableness, and I forever fascinate at the troubled soul. But never has anyone whom I felt myself as ‘in love with’ felt that way about me. Or vice versa. That is strange. As it so seems the norm. Then again, I’ve never subscribed to ‘the norm’.
Back at the Limonlu Bahçe, the boy’s sun bleached hair is lighter blond than it would be had he not spent some time on the beach, I assume. I feel like talking to him, but I don’t know what to say. And I don’t want to scare him; I remember what I was like when I was that age, and although I was fiercely independent and unselfconsciously ‘cool’, I was also wary of men of the age I am now. They were ancient. And really what was their point.
I put myself in his place and imagine myself looking at me from where he’s sitting, still held in a momentary trance, and I find it surprisingly easy to see what he sees and feel what he feels and know what he knows and be what he is and it hits me: I’m he.
Not metaphorically speaking in a similarity kind of way vaguely so, but for real. No wonder he looks so familiar. And so abjectly alien too. I have manoeuvred myself into a space-time-convolution in which for reasons I cannot begin to imagine I am sitting twelve feet away from myself, some twenty-eight years removed. Holy cow.
< {Meander} 8 The Leopard (and His Spots) >
Read Dimensions in Paperback or as eBook
EDEN by FREI 