Interlude

It’s 6.53am on a misty sunday morning. The cat sits on the window ledge and watches the world go by. 

I went to the library yesterday and got an old book on ‘wonders of this world’. All I can ever do is look at pretty pictures, lose my gaze into immortilised glimpses of natural beauty. I see high mountains lost in a hazy mist, drifts of blue ice and snow whiter than any snow I’ve ever seen; streaks of the greenest grass and oceans of golden sand... The most striking of waterfalls that seem to break free from canyons in majestic curtains of bubbling water crashing down the most mesmerising of valleys... 

And all this I see through the pages of an old book and I will probably never get a chance to witness such beauty myself. Yet as I take a stroll in the park nearby I find small patches of what I choose to see as wilderness and as I forget the spoils around to focus on one tiny glimpse of beauty I am again overwhelmed. Peering through the dense foliage of a weeping willow by the mossy lake I find myself in the midst of a distant land and further down that lake turned river lie the neverending green valleys and their untamed waterfalls. I glance over my shoulder and I am back to reality at once. 

Reality and its tall, grey buildings, the screeching of cars, the unseen smokes and broken skies. The patches of grass lose their sheen and return to their puny-looking selves, dry and stumped on far too many times. The pebbly paths no longer lead to wilderness unspoilt but back to greyer walls and colder grounds made of concrete and asphalt. My eyes have grown weary and my mind is tired. I can no longer pretend to see what is not really there yet I have so little strength to follow what the eye within only can see.