Things the Mirror Shows, Things the Mirror Doesn’t

So I decided this evening to go for a walk. I don’t think I’ve ever ‘gone for a walk’ in this sense before, and I don’t want to make a habit of it. Cold, with irritating light rain. But I thought it was a healthy way of continuing a mental investigation I had been working on all day. That is, how much happier I could make myself by giving up the chase on the person that’s occupied my thoughts solidly for the last two weeks, and I guess the last four years.

It was an exercise in contrived spontaneity. Ill-fitting, expensive clothes bought from Stockholm. Brutally beautiful dubstep synced onto my iPod shuffle. An arrogantly definitive pair of headphones. I had a place in mind to head to, nowhere special, an abandoned outdoor swimming pool near the quay.  It’s the sort of self-conscious event that novelists and directors would have us believe all humanity does when in states of transition, and the sort of event that never actually does. For me at least. Change happens in the background. A watched pot never boils, right?

The swimming pool was only a mile or so away. It wasn’t the pool that interested me (there isn’t a pool there anymore, just a vague mossy contour on the ground) but a stair set near by. A weird stair set, one which winds round and up neatly, as though it belongs safely inside a hospital or a school. Not outside, so close to the waves and the wind. Ravaged by the sea, it has lost the clarity and geometry it strived for. An incongruity beat down by Nature.

I wanted to walk up these out-of-place stairs. As I lifted my leg, my heavy with rain, ill-fitting clothes pulled against me. My pants fell down.

I love me sometimes. I feel happier already.