The super-crammed passageways are only a memory up here now. The sweaty smile-deprived buses that take ages to get down the hill don’t need to be recalled. The airless corridors of the department store and supermarket aisles flicker, a careless nightmare from somewhere else. Only lights: the tiny flames boom through black. Life from a distance. I imagine everyone getting on with their day (night) - struggling their struggles but I know they’re safe, rushing home, battling the fog and freezing winds, quickly slipping back into a cosy front-room or kitchen. Putting the kettle on. A slam of beacons. Orange dabs to make up the dream-weavers’ vista. I get into the heads of the others down there. I don’t know much about the world so I do what I can, I do the only thing I can: make it up. Lead eight million lives at once, scurrying about the estates, hurrying along the high streets. No idea why I’m so obsessed with the notion of ‘everyone else’ but I guess it makes me feel closer to the buzz of the city; lets me put an arm around it. If they’re safe down there then I’m safe up here, we’re feeding off each other’s mere existence. How the fuck else am I supposed to experience anything? It’s a big planet, a big city, but this is my life right here; my stomping ground. Different tribes across from where I am: colonised and designed to live in a harsh landscape. I’ll never meet most of them but the idea that we will exist - are existing - together across the terse terrain bubbles my blood with a positive tone.
I don’t want to be cut off by the bad frequencies; the relentless torsion of this overpopulated palace and it’s the spectre of kindred souls, scuttling down there, in the concrete valleys, that makes my heart tick over. Finding other beacons against the flow of water. I’d stay here for hours if I had the time; although I must join them, get my head back in the game, become an almost-invisible ant someone else can pin all their hopes for once.
*I’m not nauseous, I just can’t get enough. This is the same every single time: why do I bother? I’m addicted. I love the smell of that unusual heat when I get close to the tunnels. Nothing else in this people-vista looms like this, is so apparent. Off the bus, straight across the road, down the escalator, go right, head along the tunnel, first left. The pungence of the chalky corridors. Follow the stampede of souls; in both senses of the word, and know it’s probably the right direction, that I’ll eventually reach the carriages. A crazy world below the ground - I spend half my days here, I’ve got to know most of the crevices. Passages and stairwells with white shiny-brick walls. Scrapes in the unseen lift shafts. Clocks ticking. Cutting across a scramble of a scrum on another route. Interlinked. Giddy with the subterranean fumes, the whiskeyvodka.
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© Copyright 2013 John Maher