It was his stare that caught my eye, it was too intense. Behind him his partner pushed a buggy with a child in a foetus position sucking its thumb distractedly. Half pretending to be asleep, but no doubt secretly bored with being away too long from their toys. The woman is chatting animatedly on her phone, Wrapped up in a conversation with maybe her Mum, her sister or a close friend, sharing confidences or gossip and talking about tonight and their plans for it. She is walking along only half present to the street, whilst purposefully in the abstract moving her child and life forward. Her dress a coordinated range of light dusky pinks with a knitted bolero style jacket which looks as though it were made from Shirley Temple's golden curls. Her hair artfully a disheveled pile, with significant but random outlying strands aligning the face. She seems totally on it today, alert and engaged in her networking.
A good two strides ahead of her is the man, in his mid to late thirties. His body taken by his comfort eating over the cusp and beyond being slim fit, is quickly developing the squared off bulk of the stolid Dad bod. A full well groomed beard on a handsomely structured face. He's wearing all black, that is so well worn and washed that its now softened to a brushed charcoal. It has the air of being a street uniform, with miltary touches, a lot of straps buckles and lapels in a tight practical twill. Maybe this was a definite choice to wear just all black. It captured his mood or something. Or this is that lazy male habit of sticking to one colour, because that never bares much thinking about. And one would never want to make one's appearance seem too considered or deliberate, even though it certainly is. The watch word here is casual, with no observable care taken.
He's walking ahead, almost as though for today at least, he wants to literally be distant or disassociate himself from his partner and child. To appear to walk on this street alone. But not too far that it causes comment. And then there is the intensity of that stare. The eyebrows thick, horizontal but internally scrunched. There is something really pressing upon his mind, preoccupying him. He is not really present to this city-scape at all, so caught up is he in this one memory, of an event, or a cyclical battling argument with himself. Certainly this is tearing at him, tormenting him like a gremlin from the inside. Something seems existentially awry here, he has the face of a Hamlet plotting a future regicide. There is the fetid air of a person substantially stuck. Fearing the eternal nature of his own trap. Either through his own limitations of thought or this relationship. Unable to manage these better or to ever realistically find relief from how they are crushing his esteem.
Is there really no joy left in this life of his? Or has this view now become entirely self-reinforcing?. And the film that he is playing before those searching eyes is probably not helping. Circumstances seem to him, to have robbed him of any power or agency over the direction his life has taken, or will now take. After following the accepted male conventions and found them to be this deceptively tight but imprisoning paper chain. For which love, affection, sex and children form the sticky sentimental and loctite super glue for. In life a man is supposed to have all the privileges born of being male, that the woman through marriage has been deprived of, so the modern orthodoxy portrays it. Then why does he feel like they've both drawn a short straw here? Was this really what either of them wanted for themselves in their pubescent teen romance? Each now performing a role that seems not to represent their true selves anymore. Where liberation can seemingly only be achieved by driving a coach and horses through it all, in one destructive act of rage.
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