preface: not a stalker, just an observer

One thing that keeps me sane is to remember that we are all doing everything for the very first time. Nobody has lived today before and nobody has lived through tomorrow yet. Each day every single one of us that survived the day before will

wake up and not know exactly what will happen in the next 24 hours. One way to confirm this in my mind when it starts to get all existential and panicky is to notice the small things that people do to remind myself of the humanity in each of us.

I remember getting the coach from London to Cornwall back when I was at university. I was deliriously tired from the journey and at about the eighth hour in I found myself hyper-fixating on the passersby in the villages and towns I would never ordinarily visit. Part of me thought ‘Wow, I’m never going to see them again and it feels like an injustice if I don’t pay attention to who they really are right now’, so there I was watching a man sat on a bench. He caught my eye because he looked particularly miserable. He was wearing a muddied hi-vis outfit and a council bin collecting trolley was parked next to him. His leathery face was carved with wrinkles, physical evidence of every emotion he has ever felt.

He was halfway through a cigarette and I wondered how long he’d been smoking for. Did he grow up in clouds of smoke from his parents? Was his childhood walls coated in greasy yellow slime after years of smoking inside? What had brought him to that bench right at that moment? I got to thinking more about his childhood then, I imagined his favourite ice cream to be mint, at least that was the flavour he’d tell everyone to sound more mature when in reality it was double chocolate brownie with sprinkles.

I wondered if we had anything in common, me and this council bin man. Perhaps he was left handed or liked his steak medium-rare. I know I’ll never get to find out if any of my assumptions were correct and it would be incredibly strange of me to approach these people. I remember an episode of Gavin and Stacey where they’re at the clinic waiting for Nessa to have her first scan and Stacey is guessing if the people waiting are having boys or girls. The way she got past not knowing was guessing the answers too, but that’s not why I do it. I don’t need to be right or wrong, I just need to be reminded that each person has lived a life completely on their own and here they still are, taking it day by day just like me and that’s enough comfort for me.

words and ramblings