Le Raconteur Another perspective of perceptions…

Still Watching

Inspired by VeryShortStory : As my body expired, my soul was set adrift looking for a new vessel. When I drifted into a statue, I knew I might be here a while.

How long I would be here I had no idea, I had no idea of the rules of this game.  But I suspected that it would be a very long while and at first, I felt so unalive.  Then as the days dragged into weeks, I realised that I was watching life passing by.  I realised that I was getting the chance to experience life as it really was, now that I was done with rushing around, too busy to really be alive.

I noticed the colours of the leaves as summer turned to autumn, green slowly fading away to brown and finally the leaves falling to the ground.  I watched the young lovers, forbidden by custom to be together but with a passion that would set the square alight.  Wishing that someone would come along and give them the courage to stand up and fight for their love.  How different that was from the way I was, I gave up so much love for the good job, the prospects, the good life.

I watched as the tears run down the face of this old crazy looking man, who always had time to sit for a while to speak quietly to some long lost love and made me always think of all those I just let pass on without as much as a goodbye.

Then there were the students, always lively on a weekend night, with the forbidden bottle of wine and a forbidden bottle of cider.  There always seemed to be one, feeling a little flush with some cash that had a bottle of beer.  They'd congregate around my base, teasing and messing about.   Now and then a girl and a boy would move to the shadows to have a snog and a rub!  You'd hope these kids will be friends for the rest of their lives, not like how I'd turned my back on those that I had liked.

Then in the deepest of the night, there would be the lost souls who came out and hid in the doorways, some would smoke and some would have their fix, some will be drunk and some would be just very sad.  These are the ones I did not know before but now I knew so well, Arnie and Sam, Ben on his own again and Sarah who always thought she was worth a trick so she could get her kick.  These were not my people then but they are my people now.

And then the sun would come and they would fade away to hide from the 'real' world, away from them who knew nothing nor wanted to know of them.  Those were the people on those buses on their way to work as the day commenced, the buses like the one that has sent my soul to rest in this statue.

The moral : Enjoy life while you can, stop and watch and learn.  We are only here a short time.