Yesterday, I lived a novel in a day.
At least it felt like a novel. It was a novel worthy of Virginia Woolf, with shades of Mrs Dalloway all over it. Instead of a stream of consciousness and a series of rambling thoughts dotted with occasional insight, you could say my day was a rich range of Experience. Yes, reader, that was a capital E.
Yesterday, I saw a little girl drop her coat on a London Overground train. A tiny butterfly effect really. It was unseasonably warm and this little girl had had her autumn coat neatly folded over the strap of her school bag. As she followed her mother off the train, the coat inched lower and lower to the ground, finally landing in a heap at my feet. What did I do?
This is the part where I feel stunned by what living in London for 5 years can do to you. I hesitated. I debated. Do I get involved? Will anyone else notice and take care of it so I don't have to? Will it be strange for me to pick up this coat and chase a little girl?
Seriously, findingmoxie?!
It's a little girl's coat. Just deal with it. It was my stop and in my hemming and hawing, I nearly didn't make it off the train in time. I snatched her coat off the ground (in testament to the cloud most of us wrap up in, no other person on that train noticed the coat or the lady dashing forward to grab it) and leaped down from the train just as the doors began beeping. I chased after the little girl and tapped her on her shoulder.
findingmoxie: Excuse me, you left your coat on the train.
little girl: [eyes me. eyes the coat. says nothing]
her mother: [to the little girl] Is that your coat?
little girl: [nods, looking down]
her mother: [to me] Thank you. [to the little girl] Say thank you.
little girl: [mumbles] Thank you.
findingmoxie: Not a problem. Happy to hel--
her mother: [to the little girl] WHAT did I tell you about holding onto your coat?! Do you know how much a coat costs? You need to be more responsible!
findingmoxie: Um. [gulps, walks quickly away] [under breath] Sorry, kid.
Okay, so it wasn't a happy ending. And it did cross my mind if I dropped the little girl into it more than if I'd just let her forget her coat on the train. But at least I can say that I saw and did, rather than stared into nothingness, turned off from the city around me. That small act changed my day though.
It became a day where London, itself, seemed richer to my eyes.
The colours saturated and alive, and the people, oh the people were suddenly wandering
around the city fleshed out and multi-dimensional. You could go a hundred days
where everything around you is simply white noise and at best, an irritation. You
take no notice of anything around you besides the trains—are they on time or
not, which platform will I hurl myself towards, is there a findingmoxie shaped
space in that full car—and on these days, you could live in any big city anywhere. Big
City, Earth. But not today. Today, I saw
and was seen. My life crossed strangers’
lives in the smallest of ways and I was left jarred from the contact, as if I'd been woken from a deep but short sleep. Not quite rested, but fuzzily alert, as if I had just come off a transatlantic flight, fallen asleep on the train from the airport and woke up to the sudden sound of air and velocity crashing into one another as a train on the next track rattled heavily past mine. It was a reminder of my own humanity and it felt simultaneously strange and beautiful.
It made me wonder if that is how people in Small Town, Earth always feel. So part of everything and engaged. As Mrs Dalloway finds herself thinking, I can only wonder if 'this gaiety would have been mine all day' if I were a small town findingmoxie.
Thank goodness it was my stop. Don't think I would have been able to justify jumping off before my stop to return a little girl's coat (Sorry, Small Town, Earth, but them's the breaks).
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