Day 55: None of it means a thing

The light is fading. You step to the bus stop as you always do, your headphones in, and you stand in the throng, surrounded by people who are all alone. The light is fading and the sky gets dark and the trees move in the darkness, some of the leaves of the trees lit complicatedly by the streetlamp on the corner.

A tram arrives, disgorges passengers, leaves again. An elderly couple, a boy with a skateboard, a gaggle of gossiping Chinese students, travelling back to halls after a show. They move off into the night. A bus passes and the driver wears no expression, you want to reach for him but there is so much empty space, and already he is gone.

There was a time when it was not like this. You cannot now remember when this time was but you know it existed. There was a time before the world was fully formed. It has hardened into shape now and it is brittle and inert but there was a time when all things were loose. When colours came and went. When vast coruscating cities floated in your eyes. When lovers entwined and lost their carapaces and moonlight flowed through their skin.

But now there is only this. The choosing of outfits. Swearing at self-service checkouts at 9:35 p.m. Tilting your head in the shower to let the water run into your ear canal, holding your head there, tipping the water out, tilting the other way. Applying sun cream, moisturiser, shower gel, shampoo, all these products in their bottles that you cannot tell apart. And cartoned milk and packaged cookies and plastic-sealed sandwiches assembled on conveyor belts in factories in all the towns you don't want to visit. Going to work and standing at the entrance and sighing, certain you can't do it, and then stepping forwards and pushing through another day. Smoking. Giving up smoking. Mugs of tea you haven't finished. Cooking with spices from halfway round the world, then the day after eating cereal in your dressing gown in bed.

You read the news on the lambent screen on your phone and see that the world arcs inexorably towards chaos. Dissolution of communion, the breaking of what was bound. And this is how it is. We take their oil and they take our safety, and none of it means a thing. None of it is wrong, shouldn't happen -- nor is it right and pure. It just is. It is miserable and it is.

Where is the wonder that you used to know? Where is the beauty that shifted mountains? The stars that you swallowed whole? Remember the friend, the one whose fingers you touched in the grass. Was that when you were a child? Or was it further back? You were not yet born, yet you dreamed of aeroplanes, their rudders glinting in an embryonic sun. If there is a God then who taught him how to weep?

Your bus pulls in to its stop, and you get on. You put your money in the tray and the driver takes it, and though both hands occupy the same space they never meet. The driver mostly doesn't notice you and you do not notice the driver. The bus sets off up the hill and in the fading light you travel home, so removed from the magic, yet with still the faintest of its traces on your softly cracking lips.