stillfugue

Today, the movement of people around me, all around me while I sat on my stone wall, they were swimming in a tidy movement more like dance than participating in false comforts of commodities.

She was there, over in the corner of the park, pacing the bricks like she did yesterday, speaking into her cell phone, doing most of the speaking, shaking her hair that seemed to be what one would call bunned-up, but she was dark. I could pierce through to a determined kindness and a patience, a gentle warmth, but it was covered in these gray shadows that she was crafting all around herself.

Her purse, same as yesterday, massive black leather thing, bigger than a backpack. She smoked and she was smoking with stressful mannerisms but she had magnificent control. The traffic was pushed to the opposite side of the street from her, in a curving motion, and it was entrancing to me, this power.

I continued reading my book. One paragraph was magnificent, making me feel as though my reading it was creating a new life for me, a new universe.

She floated across the street inside of a massive treaty of care, right in the middle of the block but all of the traffic had lifted and there were only silent, parked cars.
She continued her conversation. All of those energetic people walking on her side of the street slowed down as they neared her as if a magnet was preventing their approach rather than drawing them in, but as it presented its resistance, it made them absorb the peace of her facial turns, she still talking on the phone, her face warming and charging the air with silky fur.

I read my paragraph again, wanting my new universe more than ever, and I looked up, and she was gone, gone, gone. All the way gone. The furious commerce was back, grotesque at full speed. I rested my skull inside the palm of my left hand, let my book fall to the brick and contemplated what tomorrow might bring.