I felt very raw and vulnerable this morning, woken violently by the shrill cry of grating iron machinery rupturing the peaceful silence of the serene garden outside my window, I shuddered to hear the motorised blade of the mower growling ferociously, tearing me aggressively out of my tranquil slumber, my warm fuzzy haze of sleep, my wonderland of dreams and memories and twirling surrealistic abstraction.
We went for a strange walk this afternoon, winding our way through a suburban labyrinth, although only a meagre handful of the houses were actually being lived it, and thus, there was an eerie sense of lifelessness in the atmosphere, it felt utterly stagnated and sour, as if all the energy and vibrancy that would usually fill a similar community with essence and humanity, had been sucked out, drained away through long plastic pipes, leaving nothing but the stale skeleton of bricks and mortar, plastic grass and pristine windows peering into empty kitchens and cold, clinical lounges, something almost surgical about the lifeless stonework and tiled roofs, the empty driveways and barren flowerbeds, like looking at a raw canvas with only a faint smudge and smear of paint loosely giving the impression of a place, but filled with no energy, no life, like someone’s fading memory of a place.
I walked through this bizarre maze in a trance, my eyes gazing around me, searching desperately for some indication that this was real, that this place was in fact a part of reality, of the world, that these bricks and windows had been made from the raw materials of the earth, had travelled here and been constructed by living people. That this bleak realm of suburbia was in fact alive and hadn’t just appeared out of thin air to taunt my mind with its lifelessness, as if it were a mirage, a desolate vision of some post-apocalyptic world that we had accidentally wandered into. I tried to imagine groups of kids running down the streets with footballs, or on bikes, shouting some remark about school or just chatting inanely, or a row of parents with push chairs in front of them coming back from the park to have a family dinner, or some moody teenagers brooding somnolently, draped in all black emo uniform listening to Radiohead, worried the smell of stale cigarettes is lingering on their school blazer, but alas, I could not, I just couldn’t see how life could fill such an empty, bottomless void, a place it seemed life went to die, not to live and thrive and grow, but to rot, to decay, to end, to squirm and whimper its last feeble hurrah, suffocated by some invisible force, some toxic atmosphere it never could see or come face to face with, that it never could understand and so was powerless to defend itself from. This was the sense I got from that suburban labyrinth.
Journal Extract by Stamos Mardou