sketch- lucky birds
fragment
Look at that formation, birds shifting positions but still somehow connected, like when someone falls behind and positions shift without thinking. A flock of birds, the street underneath, grey sky everywhere. Everything feels a little suspended for a moment. Roles keep moving. I’m moving. Sometimes one leads, sometimes the other follows. And when you finally arrive somewhere, you realize you might have changed completely. Maybe south. You’ve gone through so much that it almost doesn’t matter anymore.
They’re still flying above the cables, you know, the ones with the red lights, the same ones the tram runs on. The cables are a mess up there, and I love that about them. And there’s this guy running underneath, sweating through his jogging pants, probably on his way to the other side, maybe looking for something that feels like love. And everything is in motion, still. The tram is moving. It all keeps pouring in through my skin, through my eyes. For a moment it feels like a kind of connection I haven’t felt in a long time, and it’s a wonder how sound, colors, everything merges into one picture in my head. And in the background there’s this waste-to-energy plant, always burning, a little chaotic, a little ugly, like an actual moment of life, not staged.
Am I just the background to all of this? I usually see this place on my way out of the city. From left to right, a subway crosses the bridge, those old green bridges I’ve always liked. There are so many layers moving at once, outside and inside me, and it probably won’t be long before I move on as well, over the bridge, over the river. So many things were already built before I was born and will still be standing long after I’m gone. And then there are these buildings, sad ones, really, windows stacked on top of each other with people living behind them, exposed concrete everywhere, everyone drifting in different directions, eight or nine storeys maybe, worn-out communal blocks near a petrol station and a hardware store. And still, it hasn’t been a bad place to be. Better than somewhere else. You can almost feel the weight of time. Not in a bad way. White facades gone grey over time, like the hair in my beard. That’s all I know. Usually my writing starts with words, but this time it didn’t. I need to see things, because when I close my eyes there’s nothing there.
These are places tourists never visit. No future landmarks, just everywhere. Still, something happens there. Like driving through an old tunnel, the lights flickering overhead, or all the construction sites my boy loves so much. You have to stay long enough to find your meaning. Maybe something sits in it, like young rabbits alone in a field, hiding low in the grass. Maybe you have to strip it all back, layer by layer. You even have to break something in the process, eventually, maybe something inside yourself.
Like a flock, we’re still connected to all those places somewhere else, like falling behind friends who moved on. My best friend moved away, and I’m still here, pushing through my shift, walking past the spots where we used to sit ten years ago. Certain places just stay with you: a petrol station, the end of a bridge, stone formations, stairs leading down to the riverbed, sometimes overgrown with flowers, little anchors for the past. We even broke into one place once, maybe ten or fifteen years ago, nearly ripping my pants on one of the fence spikes, and went swimming at night, just because we were curious about everything back then.
It was a sunny day, August, I think. We had time then. More than we knew. None of us could imagine how much would change. Some people wanted to become lawyers, others something else entirely. He never became one, I think. I can’t even remember anymore. Always sitting on that old dam, skipping classes, drinking. And honestly, nobody really ended up where they thought they would. Some became bankers, or worse. Sometimes I don’t even know what happened to them. I can’t even tell when or how all these changes happened to me. Somewhere, the sun is already going down. But not for us today. We’re all birds heading south by nature. Lucky birds. Finding the right words for it is tricky, because there’s no real way to know if they fit, or if you ever will.