STREET OBSERVATIONS - The Invisible Person

As you passed her it was the hand gestures that caught your eye. The woman stood with two hands opened out just so, in a Virgin Mary like supplication, the shoulders shrugging, fingers bent back and then as if being counted, wagged then pointed towards a destination, coy fingers pressed gigglingly tight against the lips. All the facial and digital signifiers of derision, exclamations and enjoyment expressed in a mere few seconds,in complete silence. Not addressed to me, or to anyone in the street, but to this entirely imaginary person who stood before her in her minds eye, with whom she intently. mutely was conversing. Her eyes never looking directly in any living person's direction, This was not street theatre, nor mime performance art. It was one lonely woman half living in this and another world totally divorced from everyone else. One where she could be heard and chat freely, endlessly if needs be. These ghosts who were always reliably there for her, available at any time of the day. Awake, even in the broken hours of evening

She'd found her spot on the octagonal seats round the base of a beech tree. Aesthetically positioned at the conjunction of four busy city streets, before the steps of an old bank. Now a bar and grill trading off its former position of good fortune. There she sat sequentially forming and smoking her own cigarettes. Her practiced tobacco browned fingers betrayed a lifetime of rolling her own shag, twisting and pinching the end, and letting it rest precariously smoldering between the twin beaks of her lips. All the while continuing with the same gentle gesturing of an ongoing polite conversation with the voiceless companion without form, who seemingly sat just to her left.

It was hard to discern what her true age might be, probably in reality her mid fifties, but street life had prematurely distressed her face, by ten, maybe twenty deeply wrinkled years. Spindly legs without much muscle left, disappeared up behind the damaged pelmet of a tan coloured suede mini dress, above it a bare mid riff, with a white crop top slouching down on one shoulder. Yes, she didn't dress her age, but then why should she need to? These clothes were comfortable, its the height of the Summer heat, and here on these benches she could ochre her limbs, Briefly disguising the winter pallor of drained poor health that lay beneath. 

On a casual glance you noticed her long peroxide white hair tied loosely in a stiff bunch. Which she swished backwards and forwards in the animation of her mimetic conversation. On closer examination it was clearly a wig. You could see its wavering loose edges, the hairpins, the hair and the scalp beneath a sickly yellow green colour, the consequence of frequent home bleachings, gone wrong. Scorching the suppleness out of her own hair, turning it lifeless, brittle, reduced to shaven stumps. The wig, a resplendent facsimile for a misremembered fulsomeness of hair. Cut, woven and shaped from the head of someone else.

Why was she stood here now? Well, who knows really? I doubt even she knows. In the past, maybe she'd professionally worked these streets, until drink or stronger intoxicants took the competitive edge off her trading profile. Though that's not the sole reason why you end up on the street. These days where the causes of destitution is a highly competitive market. Hard times undoubtedly fell upon her at some point, and now even this 'performance' is not for real, not for anyone, anything, anymore. This melodrama she's acting out, is cut off from whatever was its primary purpose or place of origin. The existential reasons for surviving this far remains a mystery, long buried. Going through the motions of a life no longer lived, of friends not real or really friends, a charade that you had to take a wild guess at, what it actually meant. 

STREET OBSERVATIONS - The Thirty-Something Couple

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.