a thousand things to take care of

"Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember certain afternoons of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."

---Bowles.

A thousand books to read and not enough time. Dead Souls, for instance. A thousand places to see, waiting like so any blank postcards to be filled in. The infinity of people not yet met. This is how life in the city will break you, where every moment is a lost moment, and every glance slips away unrecognized, the image broken. There's too much light in this month by far. We float between the days, losing track. Free, weightless being; every place losing its specificity. Light years stretching out as far as the eye can see.

At Valentine's park a solitary person lying on his stomach reads a book, in a secluded corner, whilst the few remaining white people around sit in front of the live music with their beers, as if they were witness to the playing out the final days on their deck chairs. The days are numbered and yet how timeless it all seems! This summer, this heat, this light, eternally the same; only the players shift positions: yes, it's true, perhaps there are fewer dogs, but apart from that we repeat the same few lines to each other, skirt around the same fears with our cliches. Some things cannot be looked at directly. The only small redemptive rituals left open to us, as old as time itself. The gold of sun reminding us that Arcadia was never the thing.

It's like watching one's own life go by. Outside, the constant hum of the traffic is strangely reassuring, deeply familiar. People sit here half pissed, sun burnt, or unnoticed under leafy shade. A life informed by the memory of the sea; the quick of the mind gone, the slow flame of regret narrowing us down. Close by, an Iranian woman with big Sofia Loren glasses, all in brown, the works, sits down in this little oasis in the East End.

Here we all are, without any of our personal things, not even any books, quite naked to ourselves, with just this childish memory of some long forgotten innocence to cherish, when one was two. There's much work to be done, a thousand things in the soul to be taken care of, and yet we stand here paralysed, blinded and heavy-hearted, stunned by so much sun.