What is the best angle to view a street? To perceive the pavement or the people? The pavement serves as a reminder of the seemingly thousands who walk by, getting from one destination to the next, and as you stand there, you take up space. Worlds within a world, a gray slab reflecting the sky.
All of the choices you have ever made land you here. Look at the sky above or the people ahead. You may never know their names, but your eyes have met; is that the only interaction you’ll have? The street is just a general geographical gathering. The pavement holds the proof of the sonder, the millions of lives happening all at once, but only to have passed each other for a brief moment. Weathered by the years of caught rubber, their shoes probably tossed and replaced before the sidewalk’s cracks patched. The gray ground doesn’t glitter, but the use is gold. Bring yourself and your cigarettes, your life is here.
These streets are busy now, but hours later, they can be barren, the empty street corner lit by a lonely lamppost. Lively until dead. The empty spots echo the places that you used to drink. Young, drunk and stumbling in the street, but these ringing reverberations are just imitations; the memories to make here haven’t been made.
But how can the ground hold all of our weight? The sidewalk doesn’t sink, not from a carry-on suitcase on the way to and from an adventure, the discarded cigarette butts, or the trash waiting to be picked up. Despite the added weight of the almost constructed building down the street or the couch being moved in across the way, it doesn’t drop into the tube station below. Maybe it’s because the street does not hold the weight of the conversations carried away in a breeze, only to be remembered by those involved and the occasional eavesdropper. A plan to meet this weekend; how solid is a plan made here, will you definitely see them there? It isn’t holding the weight of the hearts, heavy or light; of the stress on the way to work or the guilt of not having 5 quid for the man on the corner. This weight weighs on the people, not on the unfailing, unsunken sidewalk.
I count shoes hitting the pavement but get dizzy. There seems to be a kindred pace between mind and feet. Leisure walking was hard to come by, reflecting appropriately a workday morning, but if everyone were light on their feet, who would the pavement cracks greet?
