Flickering past the regimented tall blocks of the city, the train ploughs forward at speed, passing the rows of the building traffic on the roads adjacent. Like sterile dolls houses, the office towers are lit up in the horizon, ready for the drudge of the corporate facade that awaits.
I feel like I am watching the world from the outside, only not from above. I am very much deep within the dregs of the dark. Hidden amongst the faceless.
All these people whizzing by - in cars, on bikes, in buses, on trains. All with a place to go. A purpose. All have their story to tell; their tale, no matter how exciting or indeed, mundane. Everyone on their own trajectory heading towards their goals, their dreams, or just an aimless whim.
I am an aimless whim.
It is early morning and I am being taken to the airport. The ultimate hub of all things potential. All these journeys about to start, the possibilities budding and spreading across like a spilt liquid of happenings.
Only it doesn’t feel like a possibility to me. It feels like a death. The end of an adventure, the end of feeling alive. Returning back to the life of the undesired. How can it be called a life when you feel so dead inside it, when it has turned you into something you never wanted to be. It feels more like a disease that eats away at your soul.
As my eyes scan across the barely indistinguishable faces of the masses, I randomly pick ones out, secretly hoping I can magically swap places. You can be anyone. You can wake up one day and be a different person. You can go and jump on a different track, one going in an alternative direction. Sometimes you dare to envision yourself in that new place. But the dark thoughts put a stop to that, reminding you you’d fuck that up, just like everything else. A creeping sense of panic arises, soaking up any nicer thoughts of newness.
Maybe you can be someone else. But I am shackled to me. My own ball and chain.
When you are a child, a small acorn, you have all these dreams and ambitions. You’re stood on the vast platform with a ticket to anywhere, and just need to pick a train. It’s confusing, but it’s there, millions of choices laid out before you.
You do get on the wrong trains. That’s all part of the game. You just get off and get another one. But suddenly you notice the timetables have started to dry up. You cannot consciously pin point the moment the lines closed and the services stopped running, but suddenly you realise you have missed the train. And bus. And possibly plane too.
So where to now? The digital ticket I have says one thing, and what the digital says, goes. Time to go home. Whatever home is. For I don’t really have a home, not anymore. There is a place I end up; I am all but a squatter, an inconvenience inside walls that I should no longer be part of.
I have nothing in that city anymore. Nothing that excites me. Nothing that can comfort me. I am thousands of miles away, always, even when I am there. The loneliness and lack of purpose eats away: you become a walking carcass. Every day, like flicking through the same old tv channels. Nothing is worth watching.
Is this it? Is that what it is all for. Becoming the wallpaper that is not your taste at all. Everybody needs a meaning. Mine is hazy and indecipherable. And likely doesn’t exist anymore at all.
It’s a scary place to be, awaiting a plane back to nowhere. Sometimes the pain is just too much to contain anymore. If you violently shake a bottle of pop and leave the lid on, something inevitably has to give. I used to have things to give. Now I just wait. Wait for planes or trains to whisk me away. Only they now never come. Even when I leave.
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