The world has been a little different lately, at some places more than at others. For instance, while parts of my city are bustling again, others appear empty, not in a forlorn, but in an almost science fictional way.
It feels as if some places have been replaced with look-alike places from an alternate reality, a mirror dimension. Tables and chairs sit exactly as they would in these places, a little disoriented from the perfect position, as if someone just left with the intention of returning with a cup of coffee or tea, only to not come back any time soon.
It isn't eerie - only not something one would expect in this city, where normally, people outnumber, probably, everything in the vicinity, living or non-living. If anything, it does engender in me a weak wish for more people to show up. Weak, because a part of me loves the feeling of individuality and unguardedness that comes with being amid a small, scattered crowd. Even the wish is, more appropriately, curiosity - curiosity about whether or not the faces I have been anticipating and imagining are real, whether or not there is some prospect of friendship with the people to whom these faces belong. Will these people like me? What have they been thinking about me, if at all they have been? How different am I from what they had imagined? Curiosity, and a lot of it.
Perhaps one day, and soon, these places will be replaced again, with the ones from the reality I knew before. It'll still all be very new to me, with new protocols and new perceptions.
Or perhaps, these places, belonging to this mirror dimension, will be replaced by those belonging to another one, places that look exactly the same in many ways but just aren't.
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