I feel intimidated, cold, helpless. I'm worried I'm going to catch something horrible. The stench tickling my olfactory nerves is enticingly disgusting. It's like fried rice and prawns and some kind of vegetable I can't place, but not freshly served to a fancy restaurant's customers. It smells more like the food the overstuffed pigs couldn't shove into their big mouths that was just left on the plates, thrown out into the lane, stood on, half eaten by rodents, then left for a month, till the stench became a plague, just for me. Gluttonous pigs.
I'm trying to sleep on the step of a little alcove, but the graffiti, the words and pictures are stopping me. They're conflicting, with positive and negative thoughts and pictures scrawled across the dirty grey bricks. 'Rich Craft'. 'Seek the Truth'. 'Wealth is only a Mindset'. There are little blockish men parachuting down the side of one of the buildings. There's this grotesque mural across from me. It's got a bird's body, then off it comes about 10 tentacles, with birdlike necks and snake heads on the end. It covers a full wall. It's eerie and creepy. Looking at it, imagining it is real, wondering what it would walk like and how it would sound makes goose flesh rise all over my arms and legs.
There is a constant hum, a buzzing of machines in the buildings around me, the trams and cars passing by on the main road, not 100 metres from me... Yet they could have been 100 kilometers away. That's how much they mean to me, or affect me.
I pick up my jacket and stroll nonchalantly down the alley way.
Unconsciously, I walk down the centre of the path. Down the line of cobble stones that divided this little back street. I kick a little pebble along and think about the tiny lane. It's kinda like my life. Out of the way, inconspicuous, just little old me. Only affecting the people who come across it. The cobble stones of the path, bisecting it, I could relate to them as well. I was not only walking on the brink of this path, I was on the brink of my life too. It could go either way. I could turn it around. Do something with it.
I walked back and sat down in the alcove again.
