One Afternoon at TCR

After spending many of my hours sitting on the same chair at the same table in the same coffee shop, looking out the same window on the same street with the same stores on the other side, the same buses driving by, the same people walking past, I found myself utterly confused today when I was looking out another tall window while waiting for a friend. I felt misplaced, like a saucer in the wrong cupbord. 

Everything was different. The light and the air, the sounds and the smells, everything so unfamiliar. I got my bevarage and sat down to take a look outside. The people, the way they were dressed and the way they walked, many of them seemed to be tourists, but the majority, I would say, were just normal people in the city. People leading their lives, minding their own businesses and trying to make ends meet.

What I noticed was that most of them looked crazy angry. It was such a nice day, the sun was beaming and temperatures were super warm. I mean, who knows what's on other people's minds, and perhaps they were just tired, but nobody out there seemed to enjoy their walk in the afternoon sun. I guess they haven't heard the news yet. The next couple of days, so they say, are getting cold and grey again.

The twenty-five to Ilford, the nineteen to Finsbury Park, the fifty-five to Hackney and the twenty-four to Hampstead Heath. That't the ones that drove by in the past ten seconds. There must be a hundred different buses, each one with a fixed destination, a thousand vacant cabs, none of them going anywhere in particular, and a million busy footsteps carrying people from left to right, from right to left.