Saturday, November 09, 2013

Here to there


Artist: Aurel Schmidt

My favourite part of the day is walking to work. Everyday, I take the same route.

Everyday, my work heels rub and my bag carves into my shoulder, heavy with laptop and books and clutter. So while others march past, I wander. 

Past dark, closed shops with mannequins pinned into loud frocks, expensive price tags hidden. Past sleeping nightclubs, men in overalls hosing off the pavement (probably vomit from the night before). Down past the market, yawning and stretching in the throes of waking up. The familiar stomach-turning smells from the fishmongers, bloody carcasses swinging from great hooks, shop workers unlocking padlocks and rolling up screens. 

Sometimes I stand in line for a coffee, the barista young and awkward, tall with shaggy dark hair and fumbling hands. If I was 17, I'd be in love. Then past the entrance to a tiny, hidden park, just a patch of grass really. It feels old. The way graveyards feel. I pass the same old man with a young boy, the same kid overtakes me on his skateboard. We run to a routine. 

This used to be the poor part of town. Now it's one of the most expensive parts of the country. Most of the houses aren't big, but they have character. Wooden villas all versions of each other, lovingly detailed by builders who used to care. Most are picture perfect, but there are still some with peeling paint and rusty fences. 

You can tell a lot about someone from their garden. Most are trimmed green handkerchiefs of grass. One has an old car on cinderblocks; their curtains are always closed. One has sculpted trees like bobble heads, everything in that garden is creepily symmetrical and immaculate. My favourites have flowers winding through the fences, overgrown gardens and big leafy trees. It's the flowers that slow me down. 

Blood red, velvety roses the size of saucers, delicate creamy orbs, sprays of small fragrant petals, gentle purple and geometric ones, pure white lilies as soft as skin, with stamen so large and erect and luridly yellow they seem faintly obscene. I stop for each of them. Mostly, I don't know the names. That doesn't
matter.

Everyday, they remind me there's beauty all around me, I just have to look.




5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Every couple of months I stop here to see if you have returned. Glad to see that you are still alive and finding your way in life.

9:39 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...


Thank you anon, so much.

I'll be writing here more often. Or trying to, anyway. It's uncomfortable, like most things that are good for you. Thanks for coming back - and for caring.

Love tui

12:24 AM  
Blogger Absolut Ruiness said...

I work in Bombay and commute to my office everyday from the suburbs. Travelling here robotic and mechanical. I see the same faces everyday at the same place too. The same waft of appetizing smells from the street food vendors tell me where i am even if i close my eyes in the train. Somehow this routine makes everything else in the day bearable. Its like the blank canvas before the first stroke of paint. Again, happy to see you Tui!

11:57 PM  
Anonymous eyelick said...

It made me happy to see that you had posted. You give me hope, hope that living stable is possible, rather than the back and forth eye consistently cycle around.

2:09 PM  
Anonymous Matte Blk said...

The flower in the coke can
looks4lorn. Why? She has nowhere
to go once it blossoms. However,
on our blogOramma, sHe has the
lengthNbreadth of eternity to
grow. Follow me Upstairs...

6:49 PM  

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