What Even Is Harmony

My heartbeat returned to a steady pace. I turned to look at the backs of the couple walking away but they’d disappeared from sight. They’d made a turn into a park, or gone to another street, or the shadow of the trees hid them away in another world, away from me.1 I was safe. I had conquered. I was whole and intact. I had achieved in sitting on the bench, and was able to countenance my thoughts. The man was just a man. He was not there for me. I had summited my fear of him but I didn’t know how, only that I would have done something different even two weeks before. I wouldn’t be sitting on that bench. Something would be feeding my frantic concerns with his image, sharp and angular, but I now could see his form wasn’t craven. I wouldn’t be thinking of her, the woman who was just a woman and how she wasn’t threatened like me. I wouldn’t be knowing no-one not there with me knew what I thought. No-one sneered, or threatened, as I held back from running.

I was happy with each blade of grass itching beneath my feet telling me I was secured to the world. I was just another part of existence: another person to sit and watch, resting from a journey. That’s what it was, a journey. I didn’t need to escape. I could simply traverse.

The field in front of me held long grass, some long wild-flowers, all of which stood in contrast to the needs of the city. I tried to cast thought, logical as it was, necessary in that passed moment, from my mind. I tried to simply experience because that was all that was asked of me. I looked at the field and cut it into pieces. I placed myself within those pieces and wondered how my perspective could change with me resting on each portion of grass. How my view of the world would discover with each new position.

It would be an ambition, for a day, to move ever so slowly from one lying place to another and play spot the difference. To give into the rote of minor change.2 But the world, my world, wasn’t exterior: the woman and man showed me that. I brought them into me. The barriers between me and beyond disappeared with their arrival and the heavy heartbeat of existence came as fully-me. There was no division between mine and the world’s living pulse: it was all my doing.

As I sat, willing ease from my quiet surrounds—ease I forced into myself with a steady rhythm in addressing thoughts—the houses that passed out of my vision as I walked came to my mind: their effect in making me feel so alien.3 It had cascaded. I’d felt off, for some reason, because of the houses. They existed in, then left my periphery: the borders of my existence as moving through a world hemmed in. My feelings seeing them alien was an impulse of loss and entirely undeserving of worry as I was on my way home, to a place entirely my own. Those houses were simply a place to live, much like mine. Every-day life went on in them. I wanted my life to be normality: security in a setting. I wanted to escape what I was and go somewhere I could give up, just for a moment, to settle, but wishing would bring me nowhere. I had to continue, when I was ready, when I breathed easily again.

I told myself my home was safe and secure. Moving into it I knew it was all mine, in a way: rented from the council. I had plans to build an office. To buy a bookshelf reaching almost to the ceiling and fill it with my manuals, my novels, my old university textbooks. I would be industrious: time at my desk making the most of my day. I didn’t work, couldn’t work, so my attention would be spent fruitfully—in this manner—then I would end the day with a drink or two in my local to unwind. I would live a normal life. Maybe the houses escaping me as I passed showed me how far from that I was but I wanted to cast that fear of my world losing form aside as another unhelpful thought. I couldn’t. It had stuck. I scrambled.

I tried to take in what was beyond me, willing myself to leave all my temporary, undue worries. To take in what reality was for someone sitting on a bench a hard, clarifying walk from ease.4 I knew there was a street running off behind me, turning at my back onto another street, and on that street was wasteland from a house knocked to widen the footpath. The footpath was being built, on and off, on that scrap of barren site for years. It still hadn’t been completed, and I knew this, but I didn’t know if I could see it in my mind’s eye. If thoughts could amass as an image in my thinking or if I just believed I could or couldn’t picture them.5 I turned to look at it, paying attention to the small grasping wild-land fluttering out of my vision as my stare moved from the field, across the street and onto the patch of nothing next to the abandoned house. It was left as an edge, an uncared for plot.

My eyes took in broken joists not quite supporting a wall that could fall at any minute, but wouldn’t. I wanted the wall to fall on me. I wanted to sit on broken bricks, broken bottles, and scattered, cracked needles. That was more true to me than this symbol of peace I sat before, the pleasant green field at the side of my eyes and never truly before me. I was broken. Could I be rebuilt like that footpath not-yet-created but desired for just a little harmony in the small city world? What even was harmony? It couldn’t exist for me.

I stood, took a step from the bench, then remembered my shoes. I bent to pick them then walked across a road without waiting for the green man. There were no cars in sight. There was no need to worry. The only need was to be myself and I could be more myself sitting on that derelict little abandonment. Just like me it was something small to be renewed, or more likely ignored. Me to be assumed, just there and existing. Just existing.

The holding of land I set my eye on wasn’t quite covered in gravel it was more an assortment of rough cut stone to give the impression of work. Someone had abandoned their pants there. Brown, crusted, and dried up in a ball they were next to a plastic bag filled with sliced open cans, and a nearly empty Coke bottle. I saw an effort. The lowest of the low—who had been taken by this place—trying to clean and to tidy. They didn’t take their rubbish with them but they knew enough to collect it in one carrier bag. It was enough. That was the importance of the matter, doing enough.

I lifted my leg and stepped over the hastily constructed, piled up and cemented, three block barrier. My jeans caught on my knees with the movement. I strained at restriction. I lowered my foot anticipating roots. I touched the cool earth behind the wall, being its shadow. My touch felt moist, and gritty; unnatural on a rubbled hole of city-forsaken more alive than the picturesque view of green, yellow and white posies I’d just left. Pebbles embedded in my sole and that was more real than the itch I felt when I set my feet on the crumpled stalks of grass by the bench.

I moved across the levelled ground, reached the supported wall of the house that was left to border this half-worked site and placed my hand against it as though I’d just run a marathon. The chaotic pattern of bubbling stone and cement left a mark on my palm.

I sat on the earth. I felt the sand beneath me leave a stain on my jeans’ arse and thighs. This ruinous break from a town’s pattern was more true to me. This was what mattered, uncared for, forlorn, in the back of someone’s mind who barely thinks during their work and only then as instructed: saving themselves for never coming escape. This was where you could really exist in the quiet noise of a city.6

I looked up and over at the houses on the street where I had walked from the hospital. Where they sloped out of all that I knew as I passed them. Where I fought the man in my thoughts. It’s not that I believed existence stopped as the houses slowly exited my sight more that they passed into some other state, ready and poised. It was obvious to me that half states were more real than totalities or nothings. Half states and edges were where most mattered. A mother doesn’t worry on a child except when it’s screaming or quiet, but worry’s thread runs through her mind. It’s sewed in there, the needle passing above the cloth, then below, pulling the line. Its path can be traced in halves, awareness then lack of awareness, and both combining to a knowable course except when the hidden stitch changes out of view. It’s a knowing through impression rather than certainty. Always ready to be surprised but having to take comfort in an awareness guessing at the approximate, mostly true. A presumption of truth. A hope for a future, that all will be right.

Taken by the view of nothing I was admiring7 I heard a shuffling.

I looked up.

“Do you mind?” a man asked. He carried a white plastic bag filled with cans and went to sit on the precarious, low wall in front of me. Why he came to me I don’t know, in his bright blue denims and grey zip-up hoodie, ginger hair, and blistered, chapped lips.

“Not at all,” I said. I knew this broken away fort in the city was free for all and not mine to offer but there was a civility in his question. It was as though with so little he could only rely on a gentle peace between people: between me and him.

He sat and reached into the bag and took out a four-pack of Polish beer still held together by its plastic ring. I could see condensation on them and wanted to reach out and drag my finger across it.

“Do you want one?” he asked. His offer was more than generous from someone who looked to live their day with those few drinks.

I smiled and shook my head. He opened the can.8

“Would you normally sit the other way?” I asked. “Facing towards the field or the street?” I raised my hand to indicate the old avenue I’d come so far from, the alienation I’d found myself from, the field I couldn’t truly see.

“No. This is me here,” he said. He nodded at himself.

“I like it too,” I said.

I wondered if the balled up pants lying a few feet from me were his or if he knew the person who abandoned them.

“Why not the park?” he asked, head inclined towards the bench I’d just left.

“This isn’t a park,” I said with a laugh.9

“You’re not the normally-here type. I don’t know you from the streets.”10

“I’ve wandered a bit,” I said. “Through them, the streets, I mean. Mostly at night. I do have a house, though.”11

“Nights are dangerous,” he said. I thought on how I imagined them dangerous and that’s why I wandered through them. I was an affront to them. A sun illuminating their cold-dark away. I didn’t, couldn’t shine as I wished, at the time, but I knew I radiated something, at least I believed I had a certain glow.

He shook the beer can, which was empty, him having skulled back the better part of it. He reached into the bag and took out another. I shook my head again in refusal before he opened it. I could tell we had fallen into something cosy when he didn’t smile or stare just looked at me with acknowledgement as this time he took a smaller, lazier drink.

“It’s like a choice. Turning your back on the world.” I nodded towards him as he sat opposite the happenings of the street.

“What do you mean?” he asked, looking at the happenings of me, maybe seeing, probably not.

“That’s beauty, out there. A park full of wild-flowers, an old boulevard with a sky made up between trees. This,” I looked around me, “is just what’s left over, at best. Ignored, discarded. And here I am ignoring all the beauty for it instead.”

He took a deeper drink and I knew he was thinking. Whether he was thinking on my madness or his own wandering thoughts I didn’t know. His slow sips on his drink told me I hadn’t bothered him, that I was as welcome to him as I was to voicing my opinions. I felt welcomed to myself. “It’s a vital sign. Turning your back on it. Beauty, order. Deciding it’s not for you,” I said. “I’m sure it’s there for some people. All they want, all they can take from it and they believe they deserve it, or they let themselves deserve it but this here is more real.” I placed one rock on top of another. A hammer on an anvil, a gavel on a decision. It made a temperate crack, barely a tick on the world’s clock as I set it down but for me it marked all that I meant.

“I do go into the field, sometimes,” he said. “Right now it’s sick with midges. It’s why I’m here, not getting some sun lying down.”

I imagined him lying down. Too tense to fully give in. He looked to be in his mid-to-late thirties but could easily be a weather-aged twenty-four.

“I like this,” I said. “It’s normal, or more normal.”I rolled the rock I’d set down over itself. A low twittering of knocks sounded as it skittered along the earth. “They’re building a footpath, here, I think. Widening it. And it’ll take this away from us. An ugly park. A broken rock and gravel park.”

“Like them religions gardens. But crap,” he said.

I wanted to laugh but his face was plain. “I know what you mean,” I said. I hadn’t thought of where we were as anything Zen. More that it was true of society. The need to always make pretty. “Who decides what’s valuable anyway? We think this place is OK.”

He had reached into his bag and offered his third can to me. I shook my head.

“If they put a bench here, a bike rack or something it’d be useful,” he said.

“Do you cycle,” I asked.

“No. I can, but I’ve no bike.”

“I have a spare one at home, in my hallway,” I said. “You could have it if you want. It’s cheap. I don’t use it.”

“I’ve nowhere to go with one. I just come here, in the mornings anyway, sometimes. Not always.” There was no offer of thanks for the bike just as I said no thanks for the proffered beer.

“At least it’s warm now,” I said.

“It’ll smell later on, with all this shite in the heat.” His empty cans had already been placed back in his bag which sat between a discarded blue and white dishcloth, all stained dirt, and a pile of rubble and earth. I could imagine a dog urinating on it, marking his spot.

“Smells are important,” I said. “Natural, I guess.” I wanted so much to smell decay in that moment. To smell rot and rising ripe ammonia of dog streak raised piss. To confirm to me I could still discern the world’s wrongs, the world’s nature, to experience it as a right. And to know that I was decay, and wrongness. I had been taken from my quiet mind and here I was spilling it out.12 I didn’t know if what I said made any sense but I believed in it. Still, I knew believing didn’t always make for truth. “Did you see the painted flower-boxes on the bridge?” I asked.

“Which bridge?”

“By the bus station.”

“Yeah, I think I did. They’re alright.” His lips pursed at his statement, then he took a confirmatory drink.

“It’s the same crowd who paint over graffiti,” I said.

“It’s good someone does it.”

“What I want to know is who decided their blue, red and yellow geometrics are more important than someone’s slogan or tag.”

He nodded. I tried coax a response from him with silence. “It’s just nicer to look at it.”

“And we’re here where there’s nothing nice.”

“You’re alright.”

“I’m a scumbag,” I said. In that instant I knew it. I was destruction. I was vile. “But it’s OK to be that.”

He laughed. “You’re pretty far from that kind.” His smile was broad and wide and I was glad he hadn’t taken offence. Me being a scumbag and sitting with him. What that could say of him but he was just like me; beneath the world, flitting in and out of its sensibility.

“You don’t know much about me.” I wanted to play but the light in his eyes was indulging and even a little scared. Maybe anxious. Maybe wanting to give into more beers than he had.

“You’re crazy,” he said.

“I am.” I laughed as he went quiet. “How do you show people madness, though?”

“I’m not sure people want to see it,” he said. “They could see it if they wanted. I know a few lads, living rough. No-one’s well like that but they’re not well at all. Nothing like that is right.”

I wanted to take offence but I couldn’t. “There’s value to this spot just as there’s value to madness as well, isn’t there?”

“I don’t think anyone could see value in this,” he said. He was holding the final can in his hand, weighing it up.

“There’s value in being allowed,” I said. I was talking more of myself than of this plot of building work but the value I was finding in myself was giving value to it and to him. “There’s value in being. Showing who you are.”

He sighed and I could hear the rattle of his scarred lungs. “You’re right. People are just people. That should be enough.”

“But showing you’re a person is hard,” I said. I shook my head. My lip curled. He waited with no words. “Showing who you are as a person, not just showing you’re a person. Showing all the broken bricks and bottles in your mind.”

“Some people don’t even have that,” he said.

“That’s sad, isn’t it?”

“They don’t know about it, don’t want to know it.”

“Why would they?” I asked, without looking for an answer. Neither of us said those were lucky people. I don’t think either of us believed it would count for luck.

Sticking his last beer in his pocket he stood. “I’m off. Gotta start my day. It was nice meeting you.”

“Could you leave me your cans?” I asked.

“This one?” he asked. He waggled the still unopened beer he clung to.

“No, the empty ones. In your bag.” I pointed towards the empties lying on the ground.

“Sure, yeah.” He looked towards the plastic bag, stretched, turned, and stepped over the low wall back into the world. Turning back he said, “I might see you around.”

Index - Moment 2