She presses up next to me, nearly touching, her body turned as if about to embrace me from the side. She has a very welcoming energy and I frequently think she is going to talk to me as if we’re old friends. I’ve never seen her before, but a part of me seems to know her. She orders her food, having trouble hearing the person behind the counter, and again she moves as if about to touch me or make a comment, she turns her face to me and opens her mouth to speak, smiles, then closes it. She wears a wedding ring and rocks her hips side-to-side in the fashion of one who is used to holding a child there, comforting it. I get my order and move off, she stays close until I depart, smiling.
Certain people speak out to me, drawing out my intimate observations; some scream quietly to be written about.
It’s December 23 and my mind moves over the flow of people at the International Mall. A constant meter-spiking conversation-white background noise presses on the ears. Voices flower around me from bodies of every size, wrapped in colors that pull as well as poke one’s eyes.
There is no overall style, other than clothed, though a few push that. The variety of human shapes and sizes make challenging work for the clothiers, though egos often distort the designers intent - and sometimes outright kills it. Many of us are a testament to the engineering strength of cotton, though Santa has made even that fashionable; compassion, generosity, and love know no shape, so we all have potential.
It’s truly amazing when one thinks of the number of languages, dispositions, statements of “I”, colors, cultures, thoughts and beliefs, and that we come to one location like this to showcase, share, smile, complain, lust after, love, envy, dream, desire.
Most of us are not isolationists on the macro, and many have no concern about expressing themselves in some way. This is one of my ways; observations of people. And there are many to observe; from the young mother who engages her child with big smiles, while occasionally touching the bothersome silver piercing at her lower lip, to the surgeon who has difficulty hearing my soft-voiced reply describing just what it is I’m doing here with my notepad and small writing (seems everyone writes larger than I), he says he’s nearly deaf, and I notice the fine clear plastic slipping into his ear canal, but I am soft-spoken usually, which makes for an interesting struggle of lip-reading from him, to the child who finds himself on the other side of the tables, both hiding and trying to get his mother’s attention while being just careful enough not to fall off the chairs, to the number of fashionable mother-daughter pairs walking about, some nearly mirror images of each other - and not often in the mother’s favor - youth has its own look, regression stands out, to the woman next to me in purple t-shirt and matching headband who watches me write while chatting with her husband, her glances at my notepad turn into full head-on attempts at reading what I’ve written from an upside down perspective, I let her see it rather than cover it up, figuring she’d have a little challenge reading my word art anyway, to the haggard father who exemplifies the word “haggard”, pushing a stroller that seems built to hold up his faltering steps, weary, shadowed eyes under gray hair that seems to stand up due to a weak electrical charge; his wife, eight content, measured steps ahead of him, carries another child at her chest, wears a smile that seems to say "payback is so worth it".
There is so much inner and outer movement here, I spend nearly four hours this day watching and reading it all.
We are a world of people gently, boldly, secretively trying to express ourselves. The struggle is in holding ourselves in, and it is our crime against nature to do so. Share yourself this holiday, be true to your needs, your desires, your expression of your truth, your loves… and the world will move.
Merry Christmas
