Multitudes
Late now and the street lamp gives everything a brand new light. Slightly jaundiced, needing vitamins. The bulb curves down like the underside of a petal. Next door’s trees fidget in a picky wind that disturbs nothing else. People are coming home, passing quickly because they own the hours until morning. Windows blink on in ones and twos until the other side of the road is divided light and dark like Solzhenitsyn and his quote about the soul. Each window has its own shining. I’m drawn to the yellow light. Maybe because it is so different from the weak sun of winter or maybe because it has the soft, gentle palette of security. It is the light of walking past a house you can’t afford and peering in and wanting the same certain expression as those surrounded by it, wanting the same protection their careful light seems to give. The flats above have a white light that is tougher somehow, the kind that lasts longest in your eyes when the sun is let in. I don’t know these people but I imagine their lives have less places to hide, that circumstances can get closer, have an authority not permitted in other lights. These are rooms with spotlights, strip lights, no lamps or shades. And later when they are switched off the windows seem to almost welcome the darkness, like how poverty can be holy, like how the historic poor clung to the idea that suffering in this life is just redemption in the next.
It seems strange and overwhelming that everything has a story like this, that even the light contains so many words. There are multitudes out there, fighting for the same space. Sometimes I think there is not enough room in my eyes and ears and heart for all of it and I have to look away. Like how odd it is to see all this movement out there and have no say in it. Around the corner is a depot where all the buses for miles both depart and return, and our little street is the last stretch on the way back. Barely a minute goes by without one of these slumped, heavy frames appearing and disappearing with a loud shush like it wants quiet. And the thing that always gets me is that the buses have already finished their routes. They contain no passengers. The lights are switched off. They might be dreaming in that half stage before sleep, where you think you’re awake but everything is gone apart from this small driver, covered in shadows, forgetting himself, one final turn of the wheel.
I remember a time when I would think of a place really far away — like one of those cities of a million people in China that never warrants a mention because the scale is so much bigger over there — and I would think of that city and all these images of movement would appear in my mind in a kind of manic fast-forward, these crowds of blurred faces on busy sidewalks, these pistons of industry shunting up and down, and the roads would be tail to tail and even the skies would be filled with contrails and smog and the consequences of progress, and this compendium of gestures and motion and innards and guts would open up this falling in me, like wanting to steady myself on furniture or anything pinned down, and it was hard for me to sort this feeling into any kind of words but when I finally did I was surprised to realize the actions themselves were sickening, the right they had to happen — sobbing, breathing, growing, dying — all this life going on without me.
