Sunday morning in London, families walk past my window dressed up in warm puffy coats and scarves and hats, holding hands or dancing and laughing and singing on their way to the zoo or the park or an art gallery or museum or brunch or pushing their little kids in prams and parents with big bags full of sandwiches and gloves and house keys and wallets and sweets … and a morning jogger runs past with her long hair tied in a ponytail, swishing from side to side behind her bobbing head, as she breathes and steps in time to the rhythm of the music pumping into her brain through the chord wire of colourful ear phones, that dangle and bounce off her chest and her shoulders, swaying forward and backward and vice versa … and cars roll past, beside grannies coming back home from church or with shopping for the next week, about to watch some tennis or listen to the radio and read the morning paper, maybe beside a fire with a cup of tea and an old dog or cat curled up by their feet for comfort and warmth … and in the windows of the flats opposite you see cute couples painting their walls a different colour and romping and playing around with the paint and laughing and falling joyfully to the ground, in a heap of limbs and love, and kissing gently or passionately, and in another window a studious student working on essays and course work or revising for January exams, and in another window a single-mother wrapping presents for her kids as they secretly peak through the crack in the ever so slightly open door and giggle to one another wondering what gifts they’ve got this year, or they themselves concocting secret plans to go in and wrap the painting they made together for her in arts and crafts class at school, but not knowing how to wrap properly they bundle it up crazily with thread and tape and rips everywhere making it a total funny crazy lovely cute mess, which brings a tear to the kind mother’s eyes when she sees it and thinks of them undergoing this crazy task, with serious giggling ambition … and just as the post man strolls merrily up the block of flats and buzzes a flat where, by the window, a lover boy is writing a letter to his darling in Sweden where she is visiting her parents.
The really sad truth is that none of this is true, in reality there are police and ambulance sirens wailing in the distance almost constantly, and car wheels screeching as young hoodlums drag race on the Highstreet and kids scream and cry and parents shout and cry inside at the loss of their dream of what parenthood could have been, and the elderly weep alone in their cold homes with no one to light their fire for them, which they can no longer muster the strength to do, and so sit lonely in the arm chair their widow bought and they cling desperately to the fading memories of the past joys of their lives, but soon their minds will wither completely and they won’t even remember a time before the abyss of loneliness and the tick tock of time and the grim reaper all converging on their sad now childlike souls … and gangs of young kids don’t go to the zoo or the park or art galleries or museums with their parents, they hang around in gangs by dumpsters or in fact stay in bed in the dark behind closed shades ordering food delivery, drinking in the morning and binge watching vapid television shows on their laptops, or hang out in car parks trying not to cough as they smoke the cheap cigarettes they stole from a convenience store where an old Indian man cries for his family and his beautiful homeland which he left behind for a life he never got … and all this horror and sorrow burns in my soul like a sword, a red hot iron thrust into my mind or a myriad of wasps trapped inside my skull stinging and stinging and I can hear them buzzing through my body and my ears bleed and arms and legs spasm and I cry for the beautiful illusions of my childhood and the fantasies I lost myself within … and there is a paralysis in my soul, as I look out at the horror of the world, with huge rubbish trucks and howling nightmare machinery roaring with iron despair and smashed bottles and mountains of plastic and garbage all destined for landfill or oceans, and I can do nothing but cry, oh this world has defeated me, the grief I feel for what existence could have been is too great, and I cannot muster the courage to wipe my pathetic pitiful tears, for I am weak and have been made weak and my innocence was mutilated and my soul no longer childlike and free and whimsical but cold and lifeless and weary and when I do manage to feel it is only the shards of melancholy that cut my heart to shreds like broken glass … oh the horror, the horror, the final horror.
Journal Extract by Stamos Mardou