A Day in The City

Some time back, I wrote a post called “Adventures in the City” about slow, deliberate walks in the city and finding adventures hidden in everyday sceneries. And I have been writing about “the City” for a while now, never calling it by name. But I took a few photos on that day (none very professional or even not-blurry, I’m afraid) and I thought it might be time for the City to be properly introduced. And since this blog is fast becoming a little piggy bank for my little moments of infinity, here it is :

The City, My City in all the delicate splendour of a mid-Saturday stroll, sounds of rustling leaves overlapping car honks and the shrill of bicycle bells cutting through.

The sky so blue it hurts my eyes, a gradient of azure that makes me itch to dive in and not surface for a while as I look for stars and nebulae hidden at the other end of the cosmos.

The bird’s beak is a nose, a mouth and a chin all at once. // An indifferent look is an endless farewell.

Little discs of sunlight, from when light streams through the gaps and interstices of the foliage, swaying oh-so gently with the wind that rustles the foliage. I’ve taken a mind to calling them “Sunlight ricochets”, lately.

I could spend forever here, craning my neck back to gaze at this lushness, this oasis of filtered light and nature in the heart of a bustling city that, too often, is harsh and cutthroat on the edges. The trees are gentle giants, shielding weary humans from the outside world as they form a dome of sorts over the heads of visitors, leaving warm sun-stains all over the exposed skin of arms, necks, faces and legs. Their endless veins make me look at mine, make me wonder at how my body is so complex : elaborate circuits running under my skin, working day and night, endlessly.

Light. This is very bad photography, probably, what with taking in all that glaring white light. But I love this, all the same.

Selfie (?)

The city, constructing itself. Constantly rebuilding, constantly changing face.

The woman turn us into poets; the child turns us into philosophers. // The true poet is he whose brain is a lyre in between the hands of the cerebellum.

 

Suffering only makes great those who already are. // Goodness civilises intelligence.

Adventures in the City

Collage by: Ayham Jabr

Saturdays, I have decided, are for lazy walks around the city.

They are for dilly-dallying, for wandering down all the roads with strange, wonderful names that I usually bypass during the week. They are for leaving the house, then returning, not knowing what will happen in between, where exactly the city will take me, or which train of thought I will board that day. It seems all I have on those days is a train ticket to anywhere and a pleasant, thrumming wanderlust.

Saturdays are for denim jackets that flap in the wind, for loose, wild hair that flies freely without care and for sneakers ready to follow the trail of urban adventures. Saturdays are for walking through the older parts of this ancient city, in those places where the trees grow so tall they become mountains that dwarf the sky into looking like flecks of blue idly passing by. They are for bathing in the honeyed light of the sun, for stopping at bridges just to watch the water flow by in rivulets.

Saturdays are for walks in forgotten gardens, those ones that are protected by trees  bending over them, standing as boundaries between the city and its gardens, accidentally creating havens and whole other worlds in the process.

Saturdays—this Saturday was for eating melting ice-cream while sat upon graffiti’d walls, looking over the city and its people while humming some happy song. Or trying to decipher the meaning of the message written in the skies. Today was for wearing a scent and letting it drift to the wind, to the city’s rooftops and to the harbour, even to the foot of the mountains.

Yeah, this Saturday was for taking blurry pictures of the sky, not to share or post on Instagram, but just to remember. To remember that this Saturday happened. That life can be good and beautiful without being complicated. That it’s always the simple things. In that case, maybe Saturdays aren’t for all those things after all. Maybe they’re just a day to breathe, to be.

 

Trouble in the City

Art by: Grant Snider

As thrilling as the city is, its modern interpretation is more lacklustre than not to me. There’s something about it that doesn’t seem natural. Something that’s not quite right.

Houses so close to each other you can almost feel your neighbour’s breath on your cheek, rooftops so close they almost collide like artificial tectonic plates, making the sky look like an azure crack in the ceiling. Apartment buildings and flats too small to house any imagination, to welcome any overabundance of ideas. But at the same time, it’s almost impressive how we are living lives of hedonism and intemperance in tiny rooms only large enough to fit our limbs. But what do we do of our dreams then? What place will they have to grow? Do we just throw them out of the window? Bid them goodbye as they go with the winds?

We’re too stressed, too hurried. Like the White Rabbit worrying about lateness, but more generally, time. We’re constantly worrying about missing out on something because there’s always something  happening. And it’s exciting that there’s always a fun thing to do anytime, but it’s just that for some reason, everything in the city is “important”. From the emails to the brunches. Yeah, even brunch holds a certain authority. Everything in the city seems to be an institution. But even so, everyone seems to be aware of it. Like we know not to take it too seriously.

But I just worry sometimes, as I gaze at the last stars in the sky, the ones under threat of disappearance by smog, that we will forget. We will forget to spend time watching ships as they go quietly by in the harbour. I worry that we will stop watching birds fly, that we won’t people-watch or contemplate the rain.

What I fear most though, is that we will stop admiring our place in the Universe. That our lives will be confined to this city and our gazes will never travel beyond its well-defined borders.

 

---

Note: This is Day 20 (!!!) of my little NaNoWriMo Writing Challenge. I’ve also written about the city before, so you can also check out this piece of writing here 🙂

The City and Me (1/2)

 

Gif Source: Tumblr (Artist Sadly Unknown)

I climbed up a hill yesterday.

On my uphill run, I stopped a few times out of breath and looked at the city spilled out below. It looked smaller and smaller the higher up I went, and with each step that led me away from it, the pressures of life and worldly expectations grew quieter, until there finally reigned silence within me.

I could almost have been running away, I thought. With my drawstring backpack and world-weariness, I was all set to leave and not come back, like in those old-timey cartoons where they carry bags on sticks and walk down railways. It felt good to see the city become so insignificant, to see that there were holes in its inescapable net. Often, with city life, it’s a lot of the now. It is a way of life that is brimming with instant gratification, where you’re always looking for that little hit of dopamine, in the number of likes you get for a selfie or the puff of smoke you exhale on the balcony. But it’s also stress, and tightly-wound shoulders, this feeling of restlessness that pulls like a hook around your navel, and an always churning stomach. It’s always good to see that the city is not almighty. To realise that far away enough, it can be reduced to a few thousand blocks laid out like Lego pieces, intermittent honking and some dog barks. The city is no end-all. And from up high, you have that odd sense of detachment, like you’re floating above everything else, watching over a million lives.

From where I was, I could even see a couple football matches. Someone was working on their car. Two cats were lounging on a terrace. You really do feel detached, like a cloud roaming without need for a purpose. But oddly again, you feel the pull, the blurry realisation that your life is also intricately woven into this tapestry, that you are a drop in this ocean (yet, incongruously, you also are the ocean itself), a grey block in the concrete jungle.

So we played “Find the house” or “Which street is that?” or “Locate the park”. All the while I could not help but think of all the lives unraveling before us, hidden from sight but ever so real. One thing about my city that I could not help but be proud of is that it’s blooming green. There are trees everywhere. Even in the dead centre (which, ironically, is the most alive with people, but doubly ironic in that they are all essentially zombies) there is at least a dot of green. A nebulous canopy reaching out for the sun.

But I didn’t have time for shrubs and greenery when the skies were opening their arms to me, as if knowing of all the times I’d gazed longingly at them. As if I had reached home on that small hill, and it was welcoming me like a long-lost child. The ocean was glittering, the azure waters of the harbour deepening into a perilous Persian blue extending beyond the horizon. The ships, large and surreal, breathtaking in more ways than one,were billowing steam and smoke, looking like they had emerged from the 1940s or even earlier.

But as much as I loved gazing at the scenery and picking out the details, we had an adventure to tend to…

To be continued…

---

.

.

.

Note: This is a late submission for Day 10 of my little NaNoWriMo challenge. The second part of this story will serve as Day 11! I was so exhausted yesterday I could not even lift my pen. But I did spend a few hours re-reading poems I really liked. So maybe it’s on me, too.