She Walked Among Us

She was enormous, naked and black. And she was walking slowly down the middle of the road. 

Nobody sounded their horn. Nobody tried to stop her. Everyone fell silently in line, exhaust fumes hanging like question marks in the freezing air.

You’d think that seeing this vulnerable giant would have been disturbing, but nothing felt wrong or out of place. She seemed as inevitable as gravity. And every half-woken commuter in London seemed to be expecting her.

According to the laws of physics, everything that happens is caused by what happened before. Whether falling in love or falling out of a window what happens next is no more yours to control than you can choose to fall upwards.

So I didn’t follow her, but I wish I had.

I wish I’d joined her brazen stand against destiny. I wish I’d stripped off and jogged alongside her. We would have walked together, through piss stained high rises and barren shopping precincts, naked but warmed by our certainty and hope.

Maybe others would have joined us. Maybe a hundred people or more. Maybe we would have been on the TV news. We could have started a movement. A beautiful, slow, falling upwards movement. She was an unstoppable ship with a cargo of broken days, and we would have been carried forever by her wake.

When fate keeps breaking your heart you can choose to detach yourself and smile like the Buddha, or you can choose to walk naked in front of traffic.

Analogue social post: flyposted, Enmore.