Vivified

Roaming around the mall looking for a table where I can read and write. The mall is for shopping and browsing goodies, who brings a sack of books to the mall to read and write? This is the kind of unbalance I'm living through.

I settled at a reposeful corner on the steps of a sunken platform, under the skylights of the grand atrium. I opened my books and scribbled away. I wondered if at any time during my meditation someone had stolen a contemptuous glance at this solitary figure scribbling alongside a sack of books in a mall. It doesn't make you special, I told myself, not by sitting there, feigning romance, looking pretty, teetertottering your head as you ponder pies in the sky.

As I finished with relative satisfaction the work I had set out to do, I turned on some music, and things came alive. What had resembled a band of hollow-eyed zombies marching monotonously (as they always did in malls)now suddenly vivified, on the surface, at least, as if they were sprinkled by things glossy and colourful. It was electrifying. That people were ascending and descending on the escalator called to mind an assembly line of dolls in a toy factory. Their heads looked bigger too.